Smart CAD Tools with ZWCAD Tutorial

in this video I'm going to be showing you some smart CAD features like smart Mouse which allows you to use gestures to start commands we're going to be exploring smart batch plot which allows you to select multiple sheets at once and then create a batch plot out of that quickly and easily we're going to be allowing us to draw allowing our drawings to speak with smart voice which allows you to leave messages to your colleagues working on the same drawings and you can just tell them with a voice recording what should be done where I'm going to be showing you a smart select which allows you to filter down your CAD drawings in order to select exactly what you need and finally we're going to be exploring Advanced ordinate dimensions for a quick and easy dimensioning all of this will be done with an affordable smart CAD software called ZW CAD let's go let's start with the main question which is what is ZW CAD well this is a CAD software that offers benefits like full DWG compatibility familiar user interface to AutoCAD complete commands extreme speed when it comes to installation opening new drawings selection hatch and so on it supports powerful apis and most importantly it offers one-time fee with Perpetual licenses which is so rare with software these days if you want to check it out I'm going to leave a link to their free trial up in the cards above and then also in the description of this video and full disclosure this is a sponsored video but now let's move on to the main part of this video which is going to be a demo of the following smart features we're going to be covering smart mouse smart batch plot smart Voice Smart select and advanced ordinate dimensioning so let's get started and let's go to ZW Cad and now let's get started with our first smart feature inside of ZW Cad and that's going to be smart Mouse so smart Mouse allows you to use gestures in order to start certain commands or assigned commands so you just want to hold your right Mouse click so I'm just going to go down and to the right and that's going to start the Align tool so as you can see here it says line and now I can just start placing lines so simply by using that gesture it started this command if I place AC gesture I'm just going to start the circle command which is really cool and what I like the most out of all of these gestures is do or redo and undo so if I go and create a dash to the left it's going to undo and dash to the right it's going to redo so I think this is a really intuitive and really good when it comes to your design instead of having to use commands you can just use these gestures for certain things most importantly you can customize that so if I go here to tools you can see that for smart Mouse we have Smart Mouse settings or you can just type in a smart Mouse configure here we go and that's going to start the smart Mouse settings and here you can see you can enable and then here you have all of the gestures that are available you can enable them or disable them here so these are the undo and redo which I really like and so on and so forth yeah and you can assign new gestures to in this case letters or any of these gestures here so for example to the left and then down and so on and so forth now I want to show you uh here I have a sign for these diagonal gestures different view modes uh orthogonal view modes so for example if we exit out of this and then let's create a rectangle which I'm just going to do by creating an R gesture so let's create a rectangle like that and then I'm just going to extrude this rectangle just like that and let's extrude it like this okay so once we have this now I can just create one of these gestures so let's go diagonally to the upper right corner like that and that's going to take us to the 3D View and now we can see this in 3D I can try a different uh uh gesture like this and it's just going to kind of orbit around and show me from different angles so it's a really quick way to go to pre-assigned or predefined views just by using gestures and it can save you so much time now let's move on to the second smart feature which I want to explore today and that is smart select so you can find Smart select by going here to express and then finding smart select here and it's going to open up that menu or alternatively you can just type in smart and then here we have the smart select and it's going to bring up the same menu so what you can see here on the menu we have a few tools here and at the top and then here we have different types of well let's call them filters where you can select first as the type of an object and then we have multiple options to choose from then we have the color then we have the layer then we have the Align type the Align weight and so on so we have multiple options which we can use to kind of make a smart selection on our drawing so for example something that's bothering me often is when users apply colors to different elements instead of just going by layer and then adjusting the color of that layer they would change the color manually and I find this really frustrating so if we want to catch them in the ACT I would simply go here to buy a layer and track that on so it's going to select all of the elements and this drawing that are created or the who whose color is defined by layer and then what they can do is I can write that right click and then I can hide those objects and now here we can see that someone's been naughty and they have been changing the color manually so here this is set to Yellow instead of being by layer and so on and so forth so now I I can easily find these in this case something that I consider an issue and I can fix it from there okay so now I'm just going to right click go to isolate and then end that isolation Okay so moving forward let's select one of the objects so for example what I'm going to do here is just to select that window and then here we have the uh I have some options and one of them is to select similar objects so by clicking that it's going to select all similar objects that we have on this drawing now I can filter this further by going here to layers and then let's actually expand the layers and now I can see for these similar objects where they're located and as you can see we have multiple layers active and let's say I only want windows so I can just click here on window and then I can find okay so all of these objects which are on the window layer they're located here so I can now kind of filter that down and use the smart selection to kind of easily access elements I really like this because it kind of reminds me of some of the features that we have in Revit which is obviously a Bim software so it's nice to see something like that add a functionality like that that allows you to filter through the through the drawing inside of CAD so I really like those options now it's time to make our drawing stock to us and we're going to be doing that with the smart voice feature so if I go here to tools what you'll notice is here we have a smart voice panel and if I start the smart voice tool I have the option to go to settings and then I can choose do I want to create this as a point region or object so let's start this with a point so what you want to do is you want to find a certain point on your drawing so for example let's go here to this I'm guessing this is a concrete column and then I can just click on that and we're going to get this little microphone icon appear next to it now once I click and hold I can record notes for somebody else that might be working on this drawing so I can say for example simple and I'm just going to click and hold we're going to need to make this a little bit bigger and then I can release it and then as you can see here it's 2.9 seconds and we can even click to play we're going to need to make this a little bit bigger so there we go that's how you make a point then the the next option is to use a rectangle so again I can either go here to Smart Voice or I can type in smart voice there we go so I can use a command like that and then again I'm just going to go to settings and go to region and then just draw a rectangle around this stair there we go and then here we have that microphone so again I'm just going to click and hold and leave another voice message please check if this stair is up to code and now I can come back here and again it's 2.9 seconds I guess that's that's as much as I need for my messages and now I can just click and play please check if the stair is up to code there we go and then finally uh let's do our object option so I'm just going to go here to Smart voice go to settings go to object and then I can select this door for example and click and hold we can place a smaller door here don't you think and now I have recorded that as well now all of my uh smart voice recordings that I have will be here in the voice manager so if we open that up you can see all of these and now I I have the length and we also have the type here and as I click on them it's going to toggle through the the drawing and just show me where that is and also if I click I can also play that we can place a smaller door here don't you think so there we go that's how you can use the smart voice to make your drawing speak and include messages to other people working on those same drawings the next feature that I want to show you is the enhanced ordinate Dimension so let me show you what you want to do is you want to type in x x dim or donate oops there we go and then what this allows you to do is just to place ordinate Dimensions now this is pretty basic we have one here well let's add a few more so for example I'm going to place one here and then one here just like that okay so once we have this in place and now we have some options where we can kind of modify this so for example this at the moment is way too small the text is way too small and I don't really like the arrow here so let's go down here to options and then I'm just going to change the text height to 250. here we can even change the text style if we want I'm just going to leave it as is and then I'm going to go to the arrow style and change that into a DOT and then click ok now what I can do is I can update and then I can say okay let's update these three here hit enter and as you can see now they're a little bit bigger now this one I might want to move or actually let's delete it all together okay so that's basically how you can place them and adjust them now let's say you want to change the coordinate Center so what you can do is again just type in X then ordinate and then go to option and here you can instead of the current coordinate system you can apply a custom coordinated system and you can just basically place it here so I'm just going to place it like that here uh no and there we go so now we have this new coordinate system which we've customized click OK and now we can update these existing Dimensions so let's update these two and when I hit enter as you can see the numbers will change according to the new uh coordinate zero they mentioned that we have specified over here now we're going to be looking at some of the smart batch plot functionality within the ZW CAD so I'm just going to come in here and type in smart oops smart plot there we go and that's going to open up the zwcad smart batch plot dialog here in this case I'm just going to set this to scatterline then I'm going to go to select batch drawings and I can just come in here and select all of these if I want hit enter to confirm that then for the device name I'm just going to set this to DWG to the PDF because I just want to export some PDFs I'm just going to track multiple as well and then finally I want to highlight this just to see kind of the order in which this will be exported and as you can see this is it one two three four five six seven eight nine once we have that I can just hit enter here you can play around with the prefix or something like that I can just remove the number one there and then here we can select the output path and once we have everything in order you just hit plot and it's going to plot these nine sheets as a PDF and this is what we get so as you can see here we have all of those sheets automatically exported and that concludes all the smart features that I wanted to share with you in this video so once again if you want to check out the free trial for ZW CAD I'd like to encourage you to check out the links up in the cards above and then also down in the description of the video so thank you for watching and I'll be back with another regular Balkan Arctic tutorial in a few days have a nice day

Channel: Balkan Architect

Views: 10,580

Keywords: BIM, Autodesk, CAD, AutoCAD, free cad, autocad free, zwcad, smart cad, smart, plot, batch plot

Id: TGjTIDSO9oE

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023