From the course: AutoCAD Facilities Management: Occupancy

Drawing units - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Facilities Management: Occupancy

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Drawing units

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- [Voiceover] We're now in another chapter of our AutoCAD Facilities Management 103 Occupancy Course, and we're going to be looking now at getting our FM Settings right. Now, that's not Frequency Modulation on your radio, the FM channel on your radio, it's Facilities Management settings that we're looking at. Now, you see we're in new drawing which is the 00 Ground FM SETTINGS.dwg file. You can download that from your Lynda.com exercise files and what you need to do is attach the GA drawing, and rename it as FP like we did in the previous chapter. I'll just show you what I mean. If I go to the Insert Tab here on the ribbon, go to Reference Panel and click on the little arrow there for the external references pallet, you'll see that I've got a renamed FP file there. If I hover over it, you can see that it's 00_GND_GA_SETTINGS.dwg. Again, that is downloadable from your Lynda.com exercise files. So make sure you attach it as an xref as per the previous chapter and then rename it as FP, like I showed you in that previous chapter, okay. Then we've got everything setup and ready to go. And we'll stick with the story now throughout the whole chapter. Now the first thing we're going to look at is our drawing units. Now the quickest way to get to the units dialog box, you just type the word Units on the dynamic input and press Enter and there's the Unit's dialog box. Now, a lot of the time with this work, with FM, you don't need massively accurate settings. I'm working with in millimeters for all of my FM drawings for the duration of this course and yet my length precision is set to two decimal places. So not really needed to be honest, you could potentially just go with, no decimal places when you're working with millimeters. Because if you're working with Facilities Management, millimeters are tiny, and there's always going to be a little bit of tolerance required there. Degrees on the other hand though, I've set those to decimal, for obvious reasons. And the precision that I always have at least one decimal place, just be on the safe side because the angle might say 60 degrees but it could be 59.7 for example. Now, clockwise or counter clockwise. If you tick that, you go against the AutoCAD default. So make sure that's unticked. All AutoCAD settings by default are counter clockwise, or anti clockwise. Insertion scale. Well, if you're working with blocks, you want to bring in blocks of the scale to millimeters and the lighting, you do not need to worry about that. So if you're working in 3D and Rendering, and the lighting in AutoCAD. Just check your direction button here and again, make sure that your base angle is East to zero so that everything is horizontal to the right. And then click on OK, and then click on OK. Now you notice when I move the cross arrow around now, there are no decimal places on the cross side, and you'll notice that on that coordinates readout down at the bottom, as well, on the status bar. Now if you don't have that coordinate readout coming up, just go across to the bottom right corner here, click on the little three bars and there's a great big long list of all the settings that you can have displayed on the status bar. The one that you need is coordinates which sadly, is right up at the top of the list of the screen. It's right up at the top. Just tick an extra coordinate and it would show up on the status bar. You then click on the little three lines, bottom right corner again to lose the Menu, and you'll have your coordinate reader on the status bar as well. So that show Units all set up to work in your 00 Ground FM SETTINGS drawing.

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