Book Image

Practical Autodesk AutoCAD 2021 and AutoCAD LT 2021

By : Yasser Shoukry, Jaiprakash Pandey
Book Image

Practical Autodesk AutoCAD 2021 and AutoCAD LT 2021

By: Yasser Shoukry, Jaiprakash Pandey

Overview of this book

AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT are one of the most versatile software applications for architectural and engineering designs and the most popular computer-aided design (CAD) platform for 2D drafting and 3D modeling. This hands-on guide will take you through everything you need to know to make the most out of this powerful tool, starting from a simple tour of the user interface through to using advanced tools. Starting with basic drawing shapes and functions, you'll get to grips with the fundamentals of CAD designs. You’ll then learn about effective drawing management using layers, dynamic blocks, and groups and discover how to add annotations and plot like professionals. The book delves into 3D modeling and helps you convert your 2D drawings into 3D models and shapes. As you progress, you’ll cover advanced tools and features such as isometric drawings, drawing utilities for managing and recovering complex files, quantity surveying, and multidisciplinary drawing files using xRefs, and you'll learn how to implement them with the help of practical exercises at the end of each chapter. Finally, you’ll get to grips with rendering and visualizing your designs in AutoCAD. By the end of the book, you’ll have developed a solid understanding of CAD principles and be able to work with AutoCAD software confidently to build impressive 2D and 3D drawings.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Drawing management using layers

Layers are really useful when you have added a great many objects to your drawing. Think of layers as sheets of tracing paper, which were pretty common in the hand-drafting days. We can draw different parts of a project on different sheets of tracing paper – you could have one sheet of tracing paper for the walls of a house, then another one for the internal furnishings of the rooms, and then another one for the dimensions. Then, we could overlap these sheets of tracing paper to get the complete house plan, and if we needed to show the drawings without any particular properties, such as dimensions, then we could simply remove the dimensions sheet from the project.

Layers in AutoCAD work in pretty much the same way, but in this case, it's obviously much more powerful and feature-packed than traditional tracing paper. In the drawing shown...