Book Image

Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 Practical 3D Drafting and Design

By : JOAO ANTONIO C DOS SANTOS
Book Image

Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 Practical 3D Drafting and Design

By: JOAO ANTONIO C DOS SANTOS

Overview of this book

AutoCAD is a computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting software application. AutoCAD supports both 2D and 3D formats. AutoCAD is used in a range of industries and is utilized by architects, project managers, and engineers, among others."Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 Practical 3D Drafting and Design" will take you beyond the 2D frontier and help you create accurate 3D models that simulate reality. This book is crammed full of creative and practical tutorials which will help you master the third dimension. From exercises on coordinate systems to creating solids and surfaces from 2D, you will wonder how you ever designed without this resource by your side."Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 Practical 3D Drafting and Design" is full of hands-on studies and projects that will help develop your 3D skills. Starting from the assumption of only a very basic knowledge of AutoCAD, this book will help you master 3D visualization and coordinate systems, create 3D models from 2D drawings, and from basic shapes, measure volumes, and other information, obtain 2D construction drawings from 3D models as well as how to apply lights and materials to get photorealistic images.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 Practical 3D Drafting and Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Volumes and other properties


During or after modeling, we may need to obtain geometric properties of solids, such as volumes for material acquisitions or moments of inertia for engineering calculations.

Obtaining volumes and other geometric properties

AutoCAD provides a very useful command for obtaining this type of information.

The MASSPROP command

The MASSPROP command allows you to obtain the most important geometric (or mass) properties for the selected solids. This command can be found on the Inquiry toolbar or the menu bar by going to Tools | Inquiry. It just prompts for the selection of solids and displays the respective properties:

Command: MASSPROP
Select objects: Selection

The properties displayed are as follows:

  • Volume and mass: Volume is in cubic units. It also displays an equal value for mass, but is useless (it considers a density as 1).

     ----------------   SOLIDS    ----------------
    Mass:   353.4154
    Volume: 353.4154
    
  • Coordinates of the corners: Coordinates of the opposite corners...