Lecture 122 - AutoCAD and Illustrator (Virtual)

today we're actually going to spend our last day in kind of the autocad realm and then we move into sketchup next week remember of course that sketchup most of you have already played around with sketchup so sketchup's going to be focused more on collage work out of sketchup getting it not to look like sketchup anymore so we'll we'll go through a little bit of the basics of sketchup but a lot of it i think you guys will pick up pretty quick as we go forward but today we're going to continue with one more day of autocad and the purpose today is to go through kind of post-processing techniques uh on your autocad file and the reason that this is important is we we do our drawings in autocad or we get an autocad drawing ready and then we have to think about what does it really look like when you go to print it out and put it on the wall what does it look like when you go to show it on a projector and how do we make it really stand out and read well so this is not something that is particularly done in practice when you're doing a set of working drawings so let's say i was i put together construction drawings i'm going to hand them off to a contractor to build something we're not going to go through this effort of post-processing because it's about this is how you build the site we barely consider line weights at that point it's just about building documents this is about selling your project to somebody it's about causing somebody to get excited about your project it's about a review it's about standing in front of a design commission in your case standing in front of a bunch of reviewers that have coming in to critique your work so the better you can show your work the better your review is going to be so this is really the fine grain look at how do we make our drawing look good on the wall i'm going to go ahead and open up the autocad file from last class actually this is for me this is a couple semesters ago i already have it laid out so i'm going to use this one as the example for today but this is already set up in our paper space we already have just like last class we already have our um 24 by 36 sheet set up it's set to print as a pdf so everything looks pretty good this is also a point where you could go in and you can make some corrections if something wasn't turning out quite correct or whatever some of you didn't quite get to this place last class so you'll be finishing up today and making sure that you get the 24 by 36 with your plan and your four elevations so i have my plan in my four elevations at this point i'm going to go ahead and just print the drawing in autocad so i'll click the plotter icon or the printer icon here all of the default options that are available here are pre-set up because i did my layout setup ahead of time in paper space so all i have to do is say okay so everything's already set up i just say okay and i choose where i want it to save so i'll go ahead and shave it into today's folder and it will write the the pdf document no i'm not going to restart my computer with the update and at that point i have on my flash drive of course it's not open here i have a pdf file that is um this this particular drawing and let's see where it is right there so it's a pdf file if i were to double click on this it would open up by default it would open up in acrobat and i could see my drawing and say okay yeah it's there that's great the cool thing about this particular pdf is autocad when it writes the pdf actually creates a live set of lines so if instead of opening it in acrobat which is the default i open up illustrator and i would encourage you to open illustrator first and then go in illustrator file open rather than trying to right click which is an option and saying open with here and then finding illustrator sometimes it's not in the list or whatever i'm going to go ahead i already have illustrator open i'm going to go ahead and go to file and then open and i'll open up my autocad drawing there so with this autocad drawing open i can press ctrl 0 in illustrator to see the whole page or the whole artboard there are some weird artifacting things that are happening on this computer and i'm not really sure why they're showing up like this but certain lines aren't quite appearing so like these lines exist in here but they're not showing up like the rest of the line so i'm going to investigate that in a little bit but we'll get there the other thing that i wanted to point out before we move forward is sometimes in illustrator you go to open your page and it shows up on its side and so this might happen to some of you so it's worth going through it just in case uh for my for me it ended up showing up in its correct orientation so that's fine i don't have to do anything i can just start working if it shows up on its side like this we need to make a correction and an illustrator making this correction is unfortunately a little bit more difficult than it should be in that we can't just say rotate the page what we do is illustrator has something set up called an artboard that is essentially the page but they call it an artboard and the reason that it's called an artboard is because you can have multiple artboards within the same drawing so you can have blow ups of certain drawings and when you export you could export all the artboards at once it's a more complicated setup but because of that we have to control the artboard separate from the content so if i'm if i'm in illustrator and i come down here on the toolbar right toward the bottom is like a page it looks like a document with a little crosshairs on one corner it's called the artboard tool and if i click on the artboard tool i have nothing selected you can see that it selects this zero one artboard one kind of in this blue color and then in my properties on the right side here i can actually change to landscape orientation from portrait orientation so i click right there to landscape and it changes my page to landscape orientation it doesn't change the content on the page that's the unfortunate thing so once i have the page set up in landscape i can go back to my black arrow my selection tool i can select everything so i could drag a box around everything or i could press ctrl a either way and i'll move to one of the corners of my drawing and i'll get that little kind of double ended arrow that's going to let me rotate if i hold down shift it will it will jump to 45 and then to 90 and i can let go and it's now oriented correctly the good news is everything stays centered so it's just a matter of changing the rotation so you have to change the artboard and then change the content and then you're set up like this and ready to go so i already have one i'm going to go ahead and not save that one i already have one here that's set up in its correct orientation let's take a look at my layers so right now i have one layer that controls the whole drawing underneath that layer if i were to expand that layer i have five clip groups each of these clipping groups corresponds to one of the viewports from autocad so if i were to click this there's one elevation on off there's the second elevation there's the third there's the fourth and finally there's the fifth so those are all little viewports when illustrator works with these viewports it creates essentially a clipping group which is a bounding rectangle and then all the content is inside of that rectangle we don't need the sophistication of a clipping group because there's no content outside of the rectangle because it was exported from autocad it's just kind of an artifact of autocad so i'm going to release all of these clipping groups so that i can work with them a little bit better that'll make them plain groups instead of clip groups so i'm going to select uh the the layer itself right here i'll start with this first one i'll come up to the three lines in the upper right corner of the layers palette and i'll say release clipping mask and it'll change from a clip group to a group i'm gonna do that for all of the layers release clipping mask next one release clipping mask next one release clipping mask next one here release clipping mask perfect so now they're all just groups which makes it a lot a lot simpler to work with so if i click on any one of them it selects it as a group i could rename these so that they'd be a little bit more intuitive so i could say let's call this instead of group this could be floor plan uh this is let's see the south elevation no this is the north elevation sorry i'm just going to call it north that one is the east this one i believe is the south yep and this would be the west i may have messed those up but anyway um the labels sometimes help you just kind of know where where certain drawings are etc so all of this is my primary layer i'm going to call the main layer here original drawing now do i have to rename these layers no i just think it really helps with the organization if you spend a little bit of time and rename the layers so i have my original drawing layer i'm going to create a copy of the whole original drawing layer so that i can work on a layer and not worry about messing it up so i'm going to select the main layer itself click on the little three lines in the upper right corner and say duplicate original drawing and there it is so i now have the original drawing copy i'm going to call this a working drawing like that i will move it below the original drawing in the layer stack then i will turn off the original drawing and i will lock it so that i can't change it at all so i preserve my original drawing and now i go to work on these particular pieces so at this point i'm going to go ahead and go in and take a look at a few of the lines that i was having trouble with i believe that this is just a display issue i don't think it's a problem with the autocad export but i'm going to double check so whenever i click on one of these views so here i am in the north elevation when i click on it it selects everything because it's part of a group if i double click on that group it will go into something called group isolation mode which grays out if i were to zoom out it grays out the other drawings and won't really let me work on those but it will let me work on this one particular group so let me zoom in here again i'm going to select several of these lines and check on their properties let me go over to properties here oh it does look like maybe the line strokes were off a little bit so let me select them all and it might be easiest to just go ahead and select all the lines of the same color so i'll click on that i'll go up to select and then i'll go to same and we'll do stroke color right there and that should select all of my siding lines right there yep they're all selected and then i can come over to the stroke and i can adjust the width here so let's do it at maybe point one point and take a look yeah maybe maybe a little more of that let's try point two here we go can you even see that yeah you can uh it's still like it looks better on my end you guys still see a little bit of artifacting in here i could go back and do that one more time so select same stroke color and i could say maybe 0.25 remember that we're in different units than we were in last time so we're in points this time in autocad we're in millimeters so the the weights don't necessarily correspond uh the other thing i could do is i could say you know what i wanted the ground to be a little bit thicker so i could select that and i could say i want that to be thicker let's do it at 2.5 and i can make that a little bit thicker let me press ctrl 0 to zoom out and we can kind of see that drawing i can back out of the group isolation mode by clicking this back one level which gets me back into the main drawing itself i could go in and i could make the same corrections for these other layers as well i'm not going to do it right now but i'm i am pointing out that you can make these corrections in the illustrator file as opposed to in the autocad file you could also go back to autocad make the corrections and re-export it you get to the same place so when we're looking at the floor plan we'll start with the floor plan here for a second as i look at the floor plan this doesn't always read as well on the screen or when we go to print it because the walls are hollow so they're just white inside it's just a true line drawing i can enhance this typically by doing a little bit of fill inside of those walls so i'm going to walk you through how to do that fill i'm going to make sure that i am working on the working drawing which is good and i'm going to do a live paint of this particular group the good news is because it's already a group all i have to do is click on the group and then i can go in and make the live paint of it so i'll click on the group i'll go to object live paint make that makes it a live paint group my little size icons around the corner of the bounding box here turn to have the little stars in them that means they're a live paint group and then i can choose the live paint tool which is probably um [Music] hidden on me there it is live paint bucket i can also press k to get to it like that there's my live paint bucket and now i can fill in various parts of this shape so let's start with the walls and i like to when i'm doing this i like to pick colors because it makes it easier to see what i'm filling in and then change it after the fact so i'll change it to black or gray after the fact but i'll fill it with colors so i'm going to go ahead and start with this red color and i'll fill in the walls and this is actually a good strategy especially if the hatches weren't working for you you can do this after the fact in illustrator pretty easily so i'll go through and i'll pick my walls to move around i'm just holding down spacebar to be able to pan and one more line right there and then these guys all right that looks pretty good i'm going to zoom out so you can see the whole thing there those are all selected in red now i'm also going to paint in where the floors would be but i've got a few threshold problems so i've got outside here but then the inside of the door is being done so if i wanted to to fill the floor on the inside different from the floor on the outside i need to make a change so i'm going to go ahead and go back to my pen tool i've done this before i'm going to press ctrl plus to zoom in and i'm going to draw a line that separates oops that and i'll draw one more line right here that separates this go like that perfect all right so i'm going to zoom out and then in order to do the live paint i need to actually merge those two new lines in so i'll select all of them oh i don't need the lower lines here select them all like that i'll go up to object live paint oh and looks like i don't have to do merge because i included it in the group already sometimes you have to do that and let me go back to my live paint and there we go yep i have flexibility again i'm going to change my color before i paint and i'll paint the exteriors in one color then i'll come back change the color and i'll paint the interiors like that and so now i have the interiors painted like that when i'm done with all of the live paints which i now am i'm going to go over to the properties and i'm going to make sure it's selected there i'm going to click on the expand button here and the quick actions and when i click on that expand button it essentially blows apart the live paint and would allow me to with the direct select tool select just the shape that is a particular color so i could select just that shape or just that shape or just that shape etc so what i'll do is i'll pick one of the colors so we'll pick this teal color i'll go to select same fill color that selects all of the teal and then i'll create a new layer and we'll call this new layer interior floor and i will move the teal objects onto the interior floor layer like that so there's the interior floor objects next thing i'll do is i'll select my walls so i'll go to the direct select i'll select one of the walls it doesn't want to let me do it so let me zoom in a little bit there we go i'll go to select and then same fill color again and these are now going to be the walls so i'll create a new layer called walls and i'll move those walls onto the walls layer and i can turn them off last thing would be the exterior so i'll create a new layer we'll call this exterior floor and i need to select same fill color and we'll move that onto the exterior floor layer there as well so if i press control minus i can zoom out and i can see my drawing here i have the floors the walls and the exterior floors all on separate layers i'll move them down below here so that you can see them a little better so when i turn on say the walls oops like that you can see that i'm highlighting where the walls are now i probably don't want my walls to be red so now is my opportunity to change the color of the walls i can select all of the objects on the walls layer by clicking over here not the circle but right next to it and it will select all the objects on that layer alternatively i could use the direct select tool select one of the walls like i've been doing if it'll let me there we go and say select same fill color either way will get us there all right now it's time to adjust those so i could start by just making the walls black so i can change the walls to be black and you can see that already that floor plan is reading a lot better this is especially important if you're going to end up projecting a floor plan so on something like this on the screen having the black walls really helps them read um if your floor plan is small generally black walls help a lot if your floor plan is big like it's a quarter inch equals a foot the black walls are too thick and they they dominate the drawing too much so it depends kind of on the scale and how big your floor plan is as to whether you want to fill them in in black now the other option that we have is instead of filling them in with black we could fill them in with some shade of gray so i could pick a lighter shade of gray or i could come over here and type in a value for k so i could say maybe i want 30 gray to fill in those walls and now those walls are filled in but not as strongly filled in and so you can kind of tell the difference so there's one in its light gray let me duplicate the layer and i'll show you them against each other all right so there it is in all black you can kind of get a sense for how that reads and there it is in gray so it's a different look and you as a as a designer have to decide how much you want to emphasize those walls or de-emphasize those walls it's a choice okay sometimes you want to show the interior floors or the exterior floors as a lighter gray so that you can kind of tell this is interior this is exterior so let me turn on the interior floors i'll select those and i can change that shade now i'm working primarily with gray i think it'd be a little weird to have the floors colored so i think using a gray is a good place to start so let's say maybe 30 percent gray here and we can fill in those floors slightly that emphasizes what's on the interior of the building versus what's on the exterior of the building that can be a good look now if i had those on and i had those on it really doesn't help so it works because my walls are different than what my floor is that helps to read you could do the inverse where you could leave the walls white sometimes that works as a strategy so again this is all a look you're kind of deciding what that look should be and maybe this gray ends up being too dark and you want to lighten up that gray a little bit more maybe you'd only do it at a ten percent gray i don't even know if it'll show up on the projector but let's try it yeah you guys can't see it as well i can see it on the screen it's a very faint gray it might be nice so that's a strategy that i've used in the past to kind of emphasize what's building and what's outside the building um and in in this it actually looks pretty good let me try on the screen let me adjust it to a 20 and let's take a look here maybe you guys can see it a little bit better yeah like that okay so again it's all about the look and what it feels like for you that even that works a little bit it's a little more subtle to have the walls a different color so you figure out what that balance is um for you such that it shows your building nicely so the other thing that i found is that sometimes the computer colors are just flat like there's not a lot of variation to them it doesn't feel like there's enough craft in them and that's where there are actually some brushes or excuse me some swatches available on the course website and i forgot to log in but if you go to resources and you go to swatches i have these prismacolor sets i think i mentioned those to you guys in the past like i said i'm not logged in but there are gray sets that have this kind of streaky pattern to them and you can use that as a fill which sometimes softens your drawing a little bit so if i wanted to do that i had to come back here in illustrator i need to open the brushes or the swatches palette let me go to window and then swatches there we go and then i need to load those swatches so i'll click the little three lines in the upper right corner i'll say open swatch library other library i have these already saved on my flash drive so under resources i think they're under illustrator there's my swatches and there is my warm grays i'm going to load the illustrator one because this is the one that has the markers with it and we'll go ahead and say open there it is and now on on say the interiors here i could select those interiors and i could use one of the ones with the marker streaks it might be hard for you guys to see it on the screen but it just softens it up a little bit so the presets these were designed based on the actual prismacolor marker colors so if you were to go in and hand color these you would get a similar effect that was the idea so the colors should be pretty close but again we're not color matching on the monitor so it's a little little tricky so i've worked through and i've decided what i think the good look would be on this drawing now ultimately i'm going to turn off my working drawing and turn on my original drawing which gets rid of those extra lines that i added it just kind of cleans it up a little bit and so that's an advantage i'm going to turn that back off turn back on my working drawing and we'll move over to the elevation view so when it comes to elevation view we have to kind of decide the same thing what is what should we collage what shouldn't we collage uh should we fill in part of the elevation in a particular color should we not um on say something like this maybe we want to fill in um part of the elevation in gray part of it in lighter gray that's certainly a strategy so i could take this drawing here oops sorry i take this drawing here i can go up to object live paint make there it is and i could paint and again i'm always oops that was not what i wanted sorry i need the live paint tool there we go and then i could paint with a particular color and i could fill in say this elevation i should have picked one of the elevations without all the little siding marks on it but you guys get the idea when i'm done once again i go back to properties click the expand button i'll use my direct select my white arrow to select that fill right there i'll go to select and then same fill color with all of those selected i'll move them on to their own layer so i'll click create a new layer this will be the we'll call it citing i'll move those onto the siding layer and then i'll change those to have a particular color to them something like that you guys get the idea but i don't want you to have to sit here and watch me fill all of those pieces in what about if we have a wall that's dominated by windows like this what could we do with those well we could start by coloring the windows so i could go in same strategy here where i select using the regular selection tool my group then i could create a live paint so object live paint make then i could go in with the live paint bucket tool and i could paint using kind of a light blue where all the glass would be like that when i'm done same thing i'll go over to properties and i'll click on expand i'll use my direct select my white arrow to select one of these and say select same fill color we'll move them over onto their own layer so i'll create a new layer and this was my north windows and we'll move them there there they are now i can control these north windows and what they look like so i could start by just taking all of those and making them a more attractive shade of blue so i could pick something a little bit lighter maybe a little bit darker something like that and i could say okay now they're all windows and they're reading as windows it's amazing how much lighter it is on my screen than it is on what you guys see and so maybe that's enough the other option though would be to actually collage in some kind of a picture of clouds behind which sometimes is a nice look it adds a little bit of a gradient to it so in that scenario i'm going to for clarity purposes i'm going to turn everything off except for these north windows and if i were to look at the north windows i have a group here and i have a bunch of individual paths that represent my all my little objects on this layer if i select them all i can make them into one compound object so i can join them all together essentially and i'll do that by going up to object compound path make i can also press control eight on the keyboard and it makes them into one compound path you see on my my um layer now instead of having all those individual pieces it's just one compound path that's what we're after so i have one path next i need a picture of some clouds so i could do a creative common search and we'll go ahead and search and so i'm just looking for a cloudy sky that i like load some more here maybe something like that okay so i once i have that and i like it i'm going to go ahead and download it let me go ahead and save image as and i will put it on my flash drive in today's folder get a new folder i actually have a bunch of skies that i've downloaded over time on my flash drive in my resources folder so i don't have to go look for them every time but there it is next thing i need to do is bring it in so i'm back to illustrator i'll go to file and then place and i will there's today's folder there's the clouds and i will paste that in right there so i need on my my layers here i need the linked file to be below the compound path so it's always compound path on top linked file below when it's set up that way if i select the main layer itself click the little three lines to fly out i can say make clipping mask and it will cut out the picture for my clouds it's kind of like in indesign when you make the compound path and then you place the file in we actually discovered that if you're trying to place like individual pictures in lots of these squares it's easier to bring it over into indesign and do the placing in indesign so you can copy it and then move it over anyway so this can be a strategy i can adjust the the background image a little bit to see a little bit more of the clouds maybe something like that and then i can turn back on the original drawing and we can see where there's clouds where the windows would be now maybe those clouds are a little bit strong i could select those go into my properties and under the opacity here i could change them to maybe be 60 percent and they've just lightened up a little bit you want to make sure that they're not too dominant i think that's one of the mistakes people make when they do collage work is that the colors end up being too dominant and you don't see enough of the drawing or enough of line weights to really read so at this point i have that elevation done i have my i'm going to turn off the siding i have my interior floor my walls i didn't do the exterior floor i don't think i need to but again i did the live paint so that i could do that if i wanted to and i would go through and i would touch up the other elevation views as well again this is a matter of editing could i collage in all the materials could i put concrete on the walls sure i could do that but you have to decide how much is too much really this is about letting the drawings read and having a subtle clue about oh that's window or oh that's that's concrete and that's a different material something like that sometimes thinking of it as materials is a good strategy we also want to make sure the floor plan is clear and easy to read in this case i think it's nice and clear and easy to read so once i'm done i'm going to go ahead and go to file and then save now the interesting thing here is we've been working in a pdf the whole time so even though we're an illustrator file or even though we're working in illustrator it's always been the pdf so it's not an ai this time it's just a pdf so i can go to file and then save and it will just save the pdf i don't have to do anything fancy there it is saving the pdf file there we go so if i were to close this drawing in illustrator and i went back to the drawing here if i double click on that drawing it will open back up in adobe acrobat with the changes that i've made ready to print so i'm still in the pdf the whole time so at this point it's a matter of of actually going ahead and printing this drawing and so this is where i'm going to talk you through kind of the printing process here um so there are two plotters hopefully one of them will be working for us theoretically you can print using the goprint server just like you do to any of the rest of the printers and that's how i'm going to demonstrate it in practice sometimes it's easier to find the cable the usb cable that's attached to the back of the printer and plug it into a computer that's close by and print directly to the printer and bypass the goprint server i'm not supposed to tell you that but it generally works better so if you're struggling if it's not showing up on goprint sit in one of those back four computers on the left side here the plotter's right behind you find the usb cord it's gray and plug it into the computer and then print directly from there okay alternatively in the other lab the plotter is the same way but you have to run the usb cord through the little glass window and then use one of the computers that's close by some of you are nodding like you've done it before so that's a that's a good strategy okay so when i go to print i've opened this up in acrobat i'll go to file and then print and under printer here i have to look for the t520c and in this case it's the 116 t520c the reason it's that one is because this is the printer in the other lab that's actually hooked up to goprint that one's hooked up to air so you're not going to find that one on goprint you actually have to plug that one in so you have to use that other strategy so once i've selected the printer if we look at the page size we see that it's only eight and a half by eleven well that's not the size we want so i need to change the page size so right here under page sizing and handling we'll click on the size button maybe well apparently it doesn't want us to do it that way let's go into properties and see if it'll do it that way there we go we'll switch to properties first so i clicked on this properties button and then under paper options here under document size um the arc d which is the size the 24 by 36 isn't listed so if you click on more you can find it in there it is arc d right there and you'll go ahead and say okay so once arc d is set up there we need to make sure and we're kind of seeing a preview it's printing off of a roll of paper so we need to make sure that it's printing in its correct orientation so let's see here they might have an arc d transposed hold on no they don't okay we'll find we'll figure out how to change it these things always move around on me okay i'm going to go ahead and just click on this custom there should be ability to rotate it lay out there we go landscape there we go i knew it was here somewhere just the wrong tab okay so i went from paper and quality i picked the arc d then i went to layout and output and right there i chose landscape so we're looking at the roll and we're it's showing us where we're going to cut it and how it's going to come out of the printer it's important that you do it this way otherwise you end up with a blank white streak on the side because the roll is 36 inches wide okay so i have that part set up i'm going to go back under resizing options it's set to actual size i'm going to confirm here under paper quality yep all that's good we're going to use the printer settings for the paper type and the paper source it should already be set up in the printer so we don't have to worry about it under your print quality here if you were printing something as like a final draft you would up the quality to make it better for our purposes speed is just fine this is on bad paper and it's not going to look that great but it's proof that you can print which is what i need okay so all of that's set up it's sometimes useful to go through the rest of the tabs and make sure there aren't any other options that we need to go through we are printing in color that's good we don't worry about any of that under advanced all of that's fine so i'll go ahead and say ok and it should update to 24 by 36 right there one more time here we need to print actual size if you shrink your pages to fit it's going to shrink your document down a little bit and when we shrink that document down it's not going to be to the correct scale anymore okay so we want to make sure it's set to actual size once all of that's done you'll go ahead and print the pr press the print key and it will send it to the printer you can go put your card key in and pay your 25 cents or whatever or it'll send it directly to the printer and start printing which is good so i'm not going to print it for us i'm going to go ahead and cancel that and i'm going to come back and keep working with this drawing a little bit more but i wanted to make sure that i showed you that before i forgot so i'm going to go back into illustrator i'm going to open this one up and go to file and then open and we're going to continue to enhance this a bit more okay so i have the drawing set up i like how they look now it's time to start thinking about labels text graphics those kinds of things so i always i always believe when i'm working on a drawing then i do triage i always say let me get so that the drawing is is good enough to use and then let me go back and add some more detail let me go back and add some more pieces and so you may argue that oh no you need labels on the elevations for it to be finished well do you really if you have good quality drawings the line weights are good and you have it on the wall and you don't have the labels on your review is still going to go just fine so you always get to the point where you're ready to put it on the wall and then come back and add more so in our in our scenario here i'm going to start working through what i want the labels to look like what i want the fonts to look like etc for this particular drawing so one of the things that people have a tendency to do is they look here at the building and they say okay well i need to label this this is the north elevation so i need to label it so let me come over here into my text and i'll create a uh let me create a layer for text here and they say okay this is great let me say this is north elevation all right and so they put that label in like that and they say oh man you know it's kind of small like i need to be able to see it so they take this and they say okay let's let's change the properties and let's say oh i don't know 150. yeah okay that's good and they put these these labels on it that are like this this happens i'm not exaggerating people do this on their drawings okay when you do this and you print that label it looks fine on the screen it's going to be like three inches tall on your drawing and so when it's hanging on the wall what are people going to look at that big text so i'm serious when i say no font larger than about 18 point max i would feel better at 16 or even 14. so it can be a little bit big but take that and really shrink it down if somebody really needs to know what the label says on your drawing make them get close make them look from a foot out because then they're going to see new stuff in your drawing that's more interesting don't throw the label up there that's gigantic so let's come down here let's maybe make it at 18 point and take a look yeah that feels a lot better i would say rule of thumb no larger than 18. so now i have that north elevation i have to decide do i want it on the left side do i want on the right side do i want it close to my ground line not so i have that one there copy paste i put it over here this was my south elevation like that okay it's starting to feel pretty good the next thing we talked we spent a whole lecture talking about fonts and typography make sure that you pick a font that seems appropriate in this case this is not a particularly bad choice it's pretty generic but it's reasonable so if you're if you're struggling stick with ariel when in doubt use ariel that's fine there are some architectural style fonts like city blueprint and country blueprint that autocad installs by default they're not the best they tend not to look too good if you really want an architectural style font i have one i use it very frequently i think it looks good it's called frank the architect if you do a google search you can get it for free the basic version is free let's see here there it is um it looks kind of like a hand lettered architectural font it's the best i've found to use and i i use it very frequently uh i actually paid for the premium version so i have the the bold version and the the italicized version etc but you can get this one for free and there's no reason not to do it uh if you want to install it on the computer you need to download it i have a folder on my flash drive in my resources folder right here under fonts you can see that i have a variety of them that i have let's see where is frank the architect there it is and those are all of them do i have just the regular one there that's the regular one and you can just double click on it and click on install these computers have been updated so we don't have to use any major hoops to install them you just click on install and it installs and that then allows you to change your fonts so i could select this and i could change to frank the architect there it is and it's a little bit more architectural again it's not huge small is good and so that might be something that you're after now sometimes you want um scales you know so you can see a graphic bar scale of your drawing i have some that are available on the course website that you can download i have all of them on my um i think it's under downloadable resource packages and of course it's all blocked out because i didn't yeah there's the frank the architect so you can click on the link it's one of these and you can download those and they show up as a zip file and i have them in resources and then in illustrator and i have them here in the title blocks folder and i have drawing notes i have drawing scales and you can use any one of these let me open up the where again we're working in quarter inch equals a foot so i'll use the quarter inch scale drawing scale i'll use the clean one here if i want to bring that in i just have to place it so i'll go to file and then place and i'll go to my flash drive that's why i just keep them on my flash drive drawing scale clean quarter right there i have two different options let me go ahead and place this first one like that now that it's in the scene here i can zoom in and we see it's just a little graphic bar scale that shows us how big uh our drawing is and so we can choose to place it somewhere um so that we have an idea of scale it's very simple i have some other ones so we can go to file and then place let's see here let's try the clean two that was just a little bit smaller same scale but it doesn't stretch out as much let's see here there's the casual one oh it's a little bit you know just a little bit of a different style and so you can set that one up it's got little overage lines in it so they're just different different little graphic bar scales we can use any one of them for our drawings the idea here is that you would place that somewhere near your drawings the other thing that you might do is i have one that is a um a title that also includes a bar scale so you would you would come in here you would set your title you can double click to get inside of this oh i have to embed it to get access to it there we go and you would say this is i forget what elevation this is this is the east elevation and so that one's kind of baked into the title itself just a different strategy etc any one of these is fine you can just create your own there's no reason you have to use mine you don't have to include a bar scale sometimes people like to include a bar scale again it's a matter of preference the ones that i have prepped i think are eighth and quarter for you so in in some very very rare circumstances you can get away with larger text and sometimes it looks nice i'll show you how that typically is done just so that you can know because you will end up seeing it like if you look at alex holgraph's work that's a good place where you would end up seeing it what they do is instead of having just the line here at the bottom of the elevation they use a color fill they use a block it works nice in section too when you have something where you've filled it in so first thing i need to do is create that colored block so i think let me go back to my working drawings there's my working drawing so i could actually work with this i'm going to get inside the group here and there's that line that represents the the dirt so to speak i'm going to go ahead and use my pen tool start on this point i'll come straight down to there i'll come straight over to there and i'll come straight back up to there and instead of having an outline i'll switch and have it just be a fill so i'm feeling what's happening in the bottom now if i were to look at this it's pretty stark because it's such a strong black so i would change this to be a much much lighter gray and i'd say maybe a twenty percent gray so let me go zero zero zero and then twenty and let's try that so in that scenario it's a much lighter gray and i think that works pretty nicely i could then take the south elevation text let me get outside of my box here i could in this scenario make it a little bit bigger maybe something like that i'm going to change the color of the text to be white so just by changing it to white i've decreased the intensity i'm not as focused on it and then i would move it to be graphically part of this shape so i'd have it kind of extend outside of the shape there a little bit and blend it together with that elevation view so it's you can get away with large text you just have to do it in a subtle manner so no big black text as an option so if i came back here i would turn back on my original drawing there i would turn back off my working i didn't make the the ground its own layer so let me go ahead and select it and we'll move that up onto the ground layer all right that allows me to turn off the working drawing the reason that i worked on the working drawing and then i turned back on that original drawing is because i still want the line of the ground i don't want to make that line go away so i have the color fill but it's below or the gray fill but it's below that that line so that's another strategy it can be a successful strategy it can look good if we zoom back out you can kind of see that the drawing still is dominant we're still looking at the drawing and the text is subliminal because it's white and it's part of that light gray background so it's not standing out that's a key part of this so i really want to emphasize that i hopefully i've beat it into you enough right now such that you won't make that mistake when you're in your studio classes no large text ever okay please please please when i come to review i don't want to see large text so this is essentially what we're doing today i do have one other thing that you could place in it's a title block that goes around your page i've kind of gone away from using the title blocks i'll show it to you just so that you can see it there's a title block for the 24x36 and we could drop it in on the drawing here and essentially what it does i'm going to need to embed it so that i can make some changes if i were to zoom in on it you can see that it adds just a little border around your page i think for presentation purposes you rarely actually need a title block i think working drawings of course you need a title block because you need to include information and notes and and those kinds of things what sheet number it is and all that kind of stuff but for presentations the idea of kind of formalizing it into a title block i think most the time is unnecessary so i would rather have you de-emphasize that don't worry about that for your for your assignment um but it is there should you should you be interested in including it um i think it's enough just to work through kind of the the general collage and whatever so stick with the grays concentrate on your fonts uh concentrate on your size of your text and that sort of thing and go from there title block is generally pretty simple it's a border around your page i would do it about for these plotters i do it about a half inch in from the outside of the page so that it shows up and doesn't get clipped and then typically in the lower right corner you'd have a little bit of information about your uh building what drawing number it was what the drawing title would be etc um sometimes you want to do it that way sometimes you want it formalized i've done this my working drawing sets have a big bar that goes up the side because of all the information you're trying to include on the title block my design sets sometimes i would do just the little one running down along the bottom of the page just to say what the drawing title would be it depends a little bit on whether you're doing a big presentation where you've printed it and put it on the wall or you're doing an eight and a half by 11 or 11 by 17 packet that you're handing somebody where each drawing is on a separate page sometimes it just depends on how you're trying to lay it out so again the this background is is an optional thing you can choose to include it you can choose to not include it and it's really it's up to you

Channel: Grant Adams

Views: 944

Keywords: DTFD, Digital Tools for Designers, AutoCAD, Plan, Elevation, Illustrator, Collage, Swatch, Diagram, Live Paint, Line Weight

Id: g66lFY37kMU

Length: 55min 5sec (3305 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020