Auto_CAD 2D/3D Panel Designing

The $mall, the εffective, the εasy: 99 AutoCAD Tips You Should Know

!!!! Tip 19 !!!!!!
How to: Place Dimensions or Hatches to a Predefined Layer

Managing layer standard sometimes very hard to do. We might miss changing the layer accidently before placing our dimension or hatches. If you do care about layering standard and want to prevent your user from making mistakes.

The most effective way are the palettes and reactors. As an example of such reactor you can use the free utility AutoLay or FLay, which places all drawn dimensions, hatches and texts to fixed predefined layers. Just load the LISP utility into AutoCAD (APPLOAD) and switch it on with the AutoLay (or FLay) command.
E.g. for FLay, you just prepare a simple text file FLay.tab with layer names for the individual object types (this file is loaded by the FLay utility). That's all, you can use standard commands. An example (hatches, red texts):

The $mall, the εffective, the εasy: 99 AutoCAD Tips You Should Know

!!!! Tip 18 !!!!!!
Which Objects are on Which Layer?

When we have a quite complex drawing, it is become hard when we need to check which objects are on which layer. Our hero to easily check this is Layer Walk or LAYWALK.

Have you ever get confused which AutoCAD objects are on which layer? When you work with layer standard, you may have dozens or even hundreds of layers in your drawing. Finding which one sets to wrong layer can be a tedious work.
Here is a little tool that will be useful: layer walk.

Type LAYWALK then [enter] to activate this tool. Alternatively, you can access it from menu: Format> Layer Tools> Layer Walk. Or access it from your ribbon: home tab>layers panel> layer walk. You may need to expand the panel to see the tool.
With this tool, you can quickly check if your objects are placed correctly in their layer. You can turn off restore on exit if you find the one placed in wrong layer and move it.

The $mall, the εffective, the εasy: 99 AutoCAD Tips You Should Know

!!!! Tip 18 !!!!!!
Set All Your Objects Properties Back to ByLayer

don’t like when I receive AutoCAD drawings with the properties overridden to other than ByLayer. It’s a bit hard to distinguish between layers in that drawing. I usually can determine objects layer when I see their color.

There are many ways to change them back to ByLayer. One popular method is to select all objects and set the properties to ByLayer or using Match Properties.
But it will be a problem when it has blocks that also have it’s property overridden.AutoCAD actually has a very handy tool for this purpose: SETBYLAYER.

You can type it in command line/ dynamic input or accessing menu modify>change by layer. Or you can find it in home tab> modify panel. Expand the panel and you should see this command like below.

''''Command: SETBYLAYER
Current active settings: Color Linetype Lineweight Material
Select objects or [Settings]:
Specify opposite corner: 167 found
Select objects or [Settings]:
Change ByBlock to ByLayer? [Yes/No] :
Include blocks? [Yes/No] :
167 object modified.''''

This is a great tool to implement your CAD standard to a drawing. It won’t take long to restore all properties to ByLayer!
...!4

The $mall, the εffective, the εasy: 99 AutoCAD Tips You Should Know

!!!! Tip 16 !!!!!!
How to: Modify Objects With Non-Uniform Scale

This image below was drawn in AutoCAD. Take a look at the railing in red circle. How can we make baluster like that?
It’s just actually a simple, boring repetitive task. As you can see, I use the baluster in all railings. I made it as a block.

After I have it as block, I can insert it and squeeze the X scale a little. I only change the X scale, but I keep Y and Z scale 1.

To do that, make sure you uncheck the “Uniform Scale” option when you insert your block.
It could be 0.90. Then I repeat the process and place the next one with X scale 0.80. The next one 0.75. I repeat the process until the last baluster. To get the correct scale, you might need to do some trials. But you get the idea.

There are many things you can do with non uniform scale. This is just one of it.

If you ever need to scale your object non-uniformly, what do you need it for? Can you share with us?