Here in the UK it is also damn cold!

So wrap up warm and when you get a moment, please check out Part 4 of my blog on AutoCAD WS for Facilities Management.

You can find it on CADpress here.

Happy CADD’ing!

SB

It’s that time of day when you shoot out of the office to grab a quick sandwich etc…..so maybe while you are munching check out my THIRD published blog on CADspeed.

It’s Part 3 for AutoCAD WS and Facilities Management….

• AutoCAD WS for Facilities Management – Part 3: Managing Your Room Changes from the Cloud

I’m away on business for the rest of the week so have a good one and enjoy your weekend!

Happy CADD’ing!

SB

I am writing a series on AutoCAD WS for Facilities Management.

Parts 1 and 2 have already been published and can be found at the following links: -

• AutoCAD WS for Facilities Management – Part 1: Collaboration in the Cloud
• AutoCAD WS for Facilities Management – Part 2: Managing Your Space from the Cloud

I sincerely hope you check these out.

AutoCAD WS is an amazing application that not only works on a standard Windows platform but now has support on iPhones, iPods and iPads and Apple computers, plus runs on any Android supported device. It even runs on the Kindle Fire!

The software for AutoCAD WS is FREE. Just click on the link above and get yourself a WS account.

Happy CADD’ing!

SB

OK, as promised (!), here we are for Part 3 of Measuring Areas in AutoCAD 2012.

In Part 2, I showed you how to calculate areas using the AREA command. What I am going to show you in Part 3 is how to use AutoCAD FIELDS to display those area values on your drawing as exact units of measurement. Now, I am based in the UK, so I will be calculating my room areas in square metres. However, those of you who still use imperial measurement (my American friends, for example), you can still do this with square feet if required.

Now, we still have our room and floor polylines displayed on our drawing. These drawing entities have information associated with them that can be displayed using FIELDS. This is the xData I mentioned in Part 2. The best bit about FIELDS is that when a polyline is edited and the area changes so does the area value in the displayed FIELD.

Section 1 – Displaying Floor Area with FIELDS

So, let’s do the easy one first. Our floor area. The drawing is very simple and we have one rectangular polyline (in green) representing our floor area.

Utilising the AutoCAD ISOLATE command from Part 2, we will isolate the floor area so that nothing else gets in the way. We can easily move the text we create later. So, just select the green floor polyline and right click and select Isolate. Fig.1 shows the isolated polyline.

Fig.1 – The isolated floor polyline

We can now use the Multiline Text command (MTEXT) to place some text within the polyline. Make sure you have a suitable text style (I tend to use Calibri or Verdana as my font) and make sure the text is the right height for use in the Model tab. In this example, I have used a text style called LABELS and given it a fixed text height of 150mm in the text style. See Fig.2 below.

Fig.2 – The Text Style dialog box

We will put the text directly in to the design space (Model tab) as they are purely labels and do not require any annotation scaling. If you know how to use annotative scaling and wish to use it, please do so. I will be writing a blog on annotative scaling in the future so don’t worry if you haven’t got a clue what I am talking about!

Using MTEXT with your chosen text style (in my case, LABELS), place your text area in the centre of the polyline area as shown in Fig.3. I have set my current layer to the same layer as the floor polyline, FLOORAREAS.

Fig.3 - Placing MTEXT in the centre of the floor area polyline

Type the following in the Multiline Text Editor once you have placed your text area:

FLOOR 1

GIA =

(GIA is an abbreviation for Gross Internal Area).

Then with the text cursor just after the EQUALS symbol, right click and select Insert Field as shown in Fig.4 below.

Fig.4 - Using Insert Field on the right click shortcut menu

The FIELD dialog box will appear. In the FIELD CATEGORY pulldown (top left), select OBJECTS. Then, select OBJECT in the list displayed. You will see Object Type and Property appear in the central column of the dialog as shown in Fig.5 below.

Fig.5 - The FIELD dialog box

Click on the small icon next to the Object Type field as shown in Fig.5. You will be taken in to the drawing. Select the green floor polyline. You will go back in to the FIELD dialog but now the properties of the selected polyline will be displayed as shown in Fig.6 below.

Fig.6 - The FIELD dialog box with precision and format controls shown

As you can see, the current area of the floor polyline is shown in millimetres as we used a basic metric AutoCAD template when we started drawing, so we need to set the precision and the format of the units displayed. Click on the Current precision pulldown and set the precision to TWO decimal places as we are working in square metres and don’t need it any higher than that in this case (See Fig.7).

Fig.7 - Precision settings in the FIELD  dialog box

Click on the Additional format button. The dialog box will appear. In order to display square meters we need to apply a conversion factor as shown in Fig.8. We also can place a text suffix denoting square metres (sq.m). Make sure you put a space in front of the sq.m text suffix so that the text preview (again shown in Fig.8) displays a space after the numerical value.

Fig.8 - The Additional Format dialog box

Once these settings in the Additional format dialog are set, click on OK.

Your preview in the FIELD dialog (top right) should now show 11.25 sq.m. If it does, click on OK.

Your appropriate field text (with a grey background masking to denote field text, not regular text) will display in the Multiline Text editor. You can now close the Multiline Text editor and save the changes. Your drawing will now look like it does in Fig.9

Fig.9 - The finished MTEXT showing the floor area polyline FIELD value

Select your floor polyline and right click and select Isolate and End Object Isolation as shown in Fig.10 below.

Fig.10 - Right click shortcut menu showing End Object Isolation

You can now see that your text is not in the best place. So just use the MOVE command to move the text. As it is the floor area, you normally (in an FM CAD environment) place the text outside the floor outline as shown in Fig.11.

Fig.11 - Finished drawing showing final position of MTEXT

Section 2 – Displaying the Room Areas with FIELDS

I won’t bore you by telling you how to do the room areas as the process is EXACTLY the same. Just make sure that you are on a separate layer such as ROOMAREAS in my case on this drawing.

Again, utilise the MOVE command to place the text where you need to and maybe consider using text justification or even rotating the text if necessary, as I have done in Fig.12 below.

Fig.12 - Finished drawing with both floor and room areas displayed

In Part 4, we will move towards putting our floor and room area values in to an AutoCAD table and looking at how the values automatically update if the room or floor polylines are edited.

As I have mentioned previously, please email me at shaun.bryant@cadfmconsult.co.uk if you need the AutoCAD DWGs (in 2010 DWG format) to work through the Quick Tip series.

In the meantime, happy CADD’ing!

SB

This one always makes me smile….

North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) track Santa every Christmas now and even have their own website dedicated to that purpose…

http://www.noradsanta.org/en/

I have shown it here in the English language, but just use the language pulldown (top right) if you need to change it.

It is one for the child within us that ALWAYS believes in Santa, right?

In this depressing world in which we live right now, a little bit of fun to make you smile is always worth it!

Eat, drink and be merry and show love and peace to all men, women and children during the festive season. Remember those less fortunate than you and reflect on how lucky you really are.

Love and peace to you all,

Shaun x

However, I was working at an amazing event with Autodesk a week or so ago called WorldSkills 2011, which is basically the Olympics for vocational skills. I was one of the CAD Experts on the Autodesk booth and it was just so much fun to teach and advise kids from primary school age upwards about Autodesk and Autodesk products. I showed one seven year old how to draw toilets and another secondary school kid how to design a missile launch station in preparation for his video game authoring career! Trust me, the Autodesk Educational Community is alive and thriving!

I learnt loads of new things too! The guys from VEX with their tennis-ball-collecting robot (designed in Autodesk Inventor) led me to the Autodesk Digital STEAM syllabus for secondary education. Just superb and ideal for getting kids involved and engaged! Go, Linda!

The kids also loved the Xbox Kinect hooked up to Motion Builder (3DS Max) and making the elf warrior dance! Jamie, inspired choice and loved Mudbox also!

One question kept popping up though. When I booted up AutoCAD, every kid I showed it to asked, “What is that thing on the startup [splash] screen?”

See the full gallery on Posterous

Well, you all know my love of music and some of you know that I will wax lyrical about Bon Jovi, one of my all-time favourite rock bands. You can imagine the surprise on these kids faces when I tell them it is the Bon Jovi stage set from their last world tour (The Circle Tour). The “wow” factor!

As soon as I tell them this, a large number of them immediately “connected” and decided they wanted to design things like that when they were older! It was a great icebreaker and worked so well to get their interest. They engaged and it was a pleasure to watch.

So, I have decided to dig deeper and look in to this more. Shaan Hurley [Autodesk] mentioned to me a while back that Tait Towers, Inc were designing the Bon Jovi set using AutoCAD and 3DS Max and after WorldSkills, I wanted to know more!

Tait Towers, Inc, as they say in the Autodesk Success Story video, are in the “spectacular business”. They are always designing the next best thing and the Jovi stage was no exception. I saw Bon Jovi at the O2 in London in June 2010 and the stage set was nothing short of amazing. The rear of the stage holds massive video screens controlled by large robotic arms which, at one point, fold down in to a staircase for Jon Bon Jovi to climb and wave at the audience. Just way cool and as a singer/songwriter myself, to have a set like that would be sublime!

So, I am not going to bore you to tears with Bon Jovi’s discography or which chord is which in Wanted Dead Or Alive or You Give Love A Bad Name. Just check out the links below to find out more. I found the whole project fascinating. Not just on a musical level either. The way Tait Towers, Inc design is clever and also makes the construction of the set quick and easy….exactly what you need when you are Bon Jovi and trucking around 16 trucks that hold your stage from one stadium to another!

Autodesk and Bon Jovi, who’d have thought it, eh? Rockin’!

Autodesk Success Story – Tait Towers, Inc (Click on Tait Towers video)

Autodesk Success Story – Tait Towers, Inc (PDF)

Cadalyst article about Tait Towers, Inc (March 2011, by David Cohn)

WorldSkills 2011 – The Vocational Olympics (BBC News)

Happy CADD’ing!

Shaun

But now, personally, I think Autodesk have excelled themselves!

Under the Design 8:16 initiative, we now not only have AutoCAD 2012 for Mac (with network licencing) but we now have AutoCAD LT2012 for Mac and a desktop version of AutoCAD WS for Mac as well.

Check out the “Year In The Making” video on YouTube!

Plus, the LT and WS versions are on the App Store! How cool is that?

I think it is great that Autodesk have expanded their OS platform. Firstly, it makes the software way more accessible regardless of which proprietary OS you are using and, secondly, it makes me want to buy a Mac!

Now, let’s look at a future for these products here.

Well, it is AutoCAD 2012 for Mac, that indicates that AutoCAD for Mac is now in the regular upgrade/new version stream at Autodesk and has a development path. I sure hope so! I sure hope that as time goes by we see more Autodesk products on the Mac too!

What about compatibility, I hear you say?

Well, right now all we are dealing with is the DWG file format which, from what I can gather, can still be picked up AutoCAD 2012 on a Windows OS. So, you can have multi-OS environments in an organisation. And, with network licencing now available for AutoCAD 2012 for Mac, you now have full controll over the software too. IT departments now have no excuse not to consider AutoCAD for Mac. Isn’t that great?

So, what about AutoCAD LT2012 for the Mac? Check out the screenshots below. The user interface looks great!

See the full gallery on Posterous

This is great news as it gives the user the choice of either full 2D/3D design (AutoCAD 2012 for Mac) or with LT, the 2D general drafting option, which some of us do prefer. CAD managers can now look at a super-user/general (sometimes part-time) user model and combine full AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT accordingly. A VERY shrewd decision from Autodesk. From a price point, this is very savvy. It also indicates that Autodesk are listening to their users!

Now, I don’t know if you saw the Facecast yesterday presented by the lovely Lynn Allen and the equally enthusiastic Amar Hanspal, but it really gave me an insight in to how Autodesk are making sure they listen to their users. Lynn’s presentation was excellent (as usual) and she promoted the users and how they have asked for new features in AutoCAD and Amar presented the commercial/business case in his usual erudite fashion. But, it is official, Autodesk are really beginning to LISTEN!

“Since the release of AutoCAD for Mac last year, customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, further validating the need for professional design and engineering software on the Mac platform,” said Amar Hanspal, senior vice president, Autodesk Platform Solutions and Emerging Business. “Bringing AutoCAD LT and AutoCAD WS to the Mac shows our continued commitment to making design more accessible for an ever-greater number of people to shape the world around them.”

AutoCAD WS for Mac looks great as well! This is a desktop version like the Windows desktop version so, again, CAD managers can look at multi-OS environments or even specialise on the Apple platform for AutoCAD.

Check out the screenshots. It looks superb, doesn’t it?

See the full gallery on Posterous

From an Apple desktop perspective, Autodesk now have AutoCAD covered; AutoCAD 2012 and LT 2012 for Mac for design and AutoCAD WS for collaboration.

How’s about if you go mobile though?

Again, available in the App store for both iProducts (iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone) and Android products (too many to mention!), the mobile arena is pretty much covered. I would still like to see a BlackBerry version though!

Again, have a look at the screenshots. There is selection of iProduct shots and Android shots in here so flick through and check them out! I am sure you will work out which is which!

See the full gallery on Posterous

In conclusion, Autodesk have excelled themselves. This will make Apple product users very happy and also secure in the knowledge that Autodesk are taking the Apple platform and OS seriously. I have been a Windows OS user up till now and I am deeply considering a move to Apple in the not-too-distant future. I was in San Rafael on AUGI business a couple of weeks ago and saw one of my AUGI colleagues using a MacBook and asked the question, “Is it worth making the move?” Simple answer, yes. You can dual boot a Mac easily now, with Windows and the new Apple Lion OS, so everything is good.

Ten out of ten, Autodesk. Staying current and keeping the users happy. Savyy!

Happy CADD’ing!

SB

OK, so here we are for Part 2 of Measuring Areas in AutoCAD 2012.

What I am going to show you is how to use the AREA command in AutoCAD and the good thing is that we already have polylines that have an area so there is no need to trace around the edges of rooms in the AREA command.

Always try and use polylines (POLYLINE) when drawing your floor and room areas. It is so much easier to work with and manipulate a polyline rather than a group of regular AutoCAD lines. Plus, you have the added advantage that polylines retain their area as xData, as mentioned in Part 1.

Section 1 – Calculating A Basic Floor Area

So, let’s do the easy one first. Our floor area. The drawing is very simple and we have one rectangular polyline (in green) representing our floor area.

Now here’s a neat trick. Do you know about the AutoCAD ISOLATE command? If you don’t, where have you been? A great tool for space management that allows you to isolate just the polyline you are working with at the time.

You can just see the green floor polyline on the drawing between the two red room polylines. Select it and then right click. You will see Isolate on the shortcut menu. Select it and then click on Isolate Objects as shown.

You will then see that the only object displayed is your green floor polyline. I must ask you at this time not to panic. All of your other AutoCAD objects are still there! All you have done is ISOLATE your floor polyline from them. A bit like a layer freeze, you might say, but without the hassle of knowing all the layer names. Cool, eh?

So, with your green floor polyline now isolated, you can use the AREA command to calculate its area. Now, at this point, your areas will display in metric millimetres as that is what I have used in this drawing, so the area numbers will look huge. Don’t worry. I am purely showing you how to calculate an area of a polyline right now. We will get to units and how to display them in a later part of this Quick Tip.

In AutoCAD 2012, you will see on the Home tab on the ribbon that there is a Utilities panel. Click on Measure as shown and select the Area command.

In this instance, our area is a one-off (i.e. only one object to measure the area of), so all we need to do is right-click and select the Object option.

Using the pickbox, select your green floor polyline. Lo and behold, the area (in square millimetres) will be displayed. You will also see that your polyline area has been highlighted in a paler green colour.

Notice the perimeter of the green floor polyline (in millimetres), plus the other MEASURE tools and an option to eXit (you can also type X and press Enter to exit).

You can now exit the AREA command. You will now be left with your green floor polyline. Select it and right-click.

Select the ISOLATE option on the shortcut menu again and select End Object Isolation.

You will now be returned back to normality with all your AutoCAD objects displayed.

Section 2 – Calculating The Room Area

OK, so a floor area was pretty easy to calculate, right (albeit in square millimetres at the moment)?.

So, the next step is to calculate the areas of each room and add them together. Now you are thinking easy. I just do what I did in Section 1 and multiply it by two as the rooms are the same size. Nice idea, but what happens if the rooms are irregular sizes and shapes?

This is where using polylines and using the AREA command come in to their own as you can ADD areas together. Nice.

Yes, they will still be in square millimetres right now, but we will deal with that later.

Go back to the Utilities panel on the Home tab on the ribbon and select Area again.

So, we are back in the AREA command again, then right-click. This time select the Add Area option.

Then, right-click again. Select the Object option (as per Section 1) as we will be selecting both our red room polylines this time.

Using the pickbox, click on both red room polylines.

You will notice that I did not use ISOLATE this time. It is because I really didn’t need to as there are plenty of points on the red room polylines to select when calculating their area. If the drawing was much busier, sure, use the ISOLATE command!

With both polylines selected, they will both be highlighted. You will notice the areas getting added on the command line.

Press Enter and you will see the last area selected and the total area displayed.

Press Enter again and you are back to the onscreen menu where you can eXit like you did in Section 1.

At any point, you can press F2 on your keyboard. This will display your AutoCAD Text Window where you can look at your history of area calculations, as shown below.

So, now you know how to utilise the Measure tools on AutoCAD 2012, especially the AREA command. As you can see, it is very easy to work with areas providing you have used closed polylines for your floor and room areas.

In Part 3, we will move towards highlighting and annotating our floor and room areas.

As I mentioned in Part 1, please email me at shaun.bryant@cadfmconsult.co.uk if you need the AutoCAD DWGs (in 2010 DWG format) to work through the Quick Tip.

In the meantime, happy CADD’ing!

SB

I work in Facilities Management (FM) on a regular basis, often working with proprietary Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) systems such as FM:Systems and ARCHIBUS. Now these systems are great and do many things to build a CAFM inventory linked to your CAD drawings.

However, what I want to do here is start with the basics rather than teach you a whole new system.

Let’s do this piece by piece so that the theory goes in to the grey cells, right? J

We will start with AutoCAD first.

I have created a very basic FM drawing showing two rectangular rooms linked by a stud wall with a couple of doors. It is very simple to make the teaching of these principles understandable.

Section 1 – Utilise External References (XREFs).

Working in FM, you normally work with two drawings per floor of a building; one drawing represents your Facility Plan which would be your structural details such as walls, stud partitioning and doors. Building objects that would essentially remain permanent and not change. The other drawing would be your FM drawing that relates to the floor number.

So I have created TWO drawings for us to use: -

Facility Plan (FP) drawing – AREAS-FP-Floor0-Gnd Floor.dwg

Facilities Management (FM) drawing – AREAS-FM-Floor0-Gnd Floor.dwg

You would then reference the FP drawing in to the FM drawing and this is what I am going to show you how to do.

1.       Open the FM drawing which will be blank right now.

2.       Then, in AutoCAD 2012, go to the Insert tab on the ribbon and select Attach on the Reference panel.

3.       After clicking on Attach, you will see the following: -

4.       Select your Facility Plan (FP) drawing and click on Open.

5.       You will then see the Attach Reference File dialog box.

6.      Make sure that you set the reference as an Attachment and that scale is set to 1 and your insertion point is X=0, Y=0 and Z=0. Ideally set its Path Type as Full. You can set it to Relative but make sure that the reference drawing is in the same folder as the current drawing otherwise AutoCAD will not find the reference drawing.

7.       Click on OK and you will see your reference drawing (XREF). It looks grey because AutoCAD 2012 has a default setting to fade XREF drawings. If you cannot see your XREF, do a Zoom Extents (double-click the wheel on your mouse should do it).

8.       Make sure you save your drawing at this point.

9.       We now need to rename the XREF for layering purposes. Open up your Layer Properties Manager from the Home tab on the ribbon in the Layers panel.

10.   You will see the following layers: -

11.   XREFS is the layer the external reference drawing is on in the current drawing. The two layers actually in the XREF are preceded with the XREF drawing name. 

12.   To shorten this, we will rename the XREF drawing to rationalise the layer name listing.

13.   Type RENAME and press Enter. Select Blocks as shown and you will see your XREF drawing in the list. Select your XREF drawing in the Items list.

14.   You will now see your original XREF drawing name as the Old Name. In the Rename To field, type in FP-. Click on the Rename To button. You will see the XREF block name change. Then click on OK.

NOTE: This does NOT change the actual XREF drawing name.

15.   Open up the Layer Properties Manager again (see Step 9) and you will see that the layer names have updated accordingly.

Section 2 – Polyline your Floor and Room Areas.

Regardless of whether you are using the slickest, most expensive CAFM system or not, you will still need to polyline your floor and room areas. You MUST NOT use regular AutoCAD lines. They have to be polylined outlines.

There is a reason for this. Polylines carry what is known as xData, in this case, the area of the enclosed polyline (and also the perimeter, but we don’t actually need that).

If you open the Layer Properties Manager, you will see we already have a layer called ROOMAREAS.

1.       Create a new layer called FLOORAREAS. Give it a green colour.

2.       We now have two FM layers we can use. Make FLOORAREAS your current layer.

3.       We can now cheat a little due to the simplicity of the exercise. Using the RECTANGLE command (which always creates a closed polyline), we can now trace the Floor Area using the inside wall edges. Just click on the diagonal corners shown using your Object Snaps.

4.       You will end up with the Floor Area shown (which I have highlighted using lineweight for clarity).

5.       Now, here’s the bit where you have to do some work! Repeat the polylining process from Step 1 but use ROOMAREAS as your current layer and polyline each Room Area as shown.

6.       Make sure you save your drawing! J

OK, that is enough for today! Come back for Measuring Areas (AutoCAD) – Part 2 next week where we will look at ways to measure our floor and room areas.

If you do want the initial drawings to work with, just pop me an email at shaun.bryant@cadfmconsult.co.uk (They will be in AutoCAD 2010 DWG format).

Happy CADD’ing!

SB

It will be held on Facebook (where else can you do a Facecast, LOL) on Wednesday, July 6 – 10:00am – 11:00am PST

The Facecast Tab is here…. http://autode.sk/kX9khB

Heidi will be reviewing parametrics and will happily take questions from the fans who are viewing the Facecast!

Bear in mind, the Facecast is in USA Pacific Time which is 8 hours behind UK time, so If you can’t make it, don’t worrry, it will be recorded for future viewing.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Happy CADD’ing!!

SB