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)

Summary

This chapter was mostly about customizations. We learned how to customize the user interface of AutoCAD and how to create custom objects. The customization tools that we discussed help personalize the user interface and make us more efficient in our drawing workflow. The custom linetype and Hatches are other great features available in AutoCAD, and they are especially useful when you need a project-specific linetype or Hatches pattern. Design Center, tool palettes, and external sources of blocks reduce our dependency on making blocks every time we need them and make the process of making drawing much easier and faster. Finally, we discussed the polyline and spline tools in detail.

In the next chapter, we will discuss external references and dynamic blocks, and both of them are interesting topics. We have already seen dynamic blocks in action in the tool palette section...