I signed up for the first ever Autodesk University Blogger Social…

I plan on blogging about my experience at AU. I’m sure I’ll learn some neat tricks to share with all of you. My focus will be mostly Civil 3D, and Map 3D but I will be taking one or two generic AutoCAD classes as well.

Are you attending AU this year? If so, and you blog about Autodesk products, sign up for the blogger social…

I have to be honest. One of the first things I do when I receive a drawing from someone is type DIMREASSOC on the command line to reset dimension text values. The reason for this is because I don’t like drawings that contain dimensions that are overridden with text values that don’t match the distance being dimensioned. Read more »

Type FIELD on the command line and you will get this box:

Select a field name and format, such as the date field in this case, and the final result will look something like: Read more »

I am lazy. So lazy in fact that I use Multilines (command: MLINE) to draw pipes in 2D. In my field (Civil Engineering) I draw pipes a lot. We have a standard pipe schedule that shows the inside diameter, wall thickness, and outside diameter of common concrete and ductile iron pipe sizes. This is a great reference, but when it comes time to draw the pipes in 2D, I have to draw the centerline of the pipe, offset 1/2 the outside diameter of the pipe on each side, and then delete the centerline. This is way too much work! So I decided to setup Multiline styles for every pipe in our schedule and save them in our standard drawing template. Read more »

Today’s tip is a drafting shortcut that I’ve been using for a long time. It’s a tip that I think saves a lot of time. Read more »

It’s happened to all of us. You receive a zipped up set of CAD files from someone, you open a layout drawing that contains XREFs, and all the XREF paths are broken. Well never fear, there is a lazy way to redirect all the XREF paths in a drawing. Here is how I make it happen. Read more »

There are quite a few ways to accomplish this and I am going to show you a little trick to find area in acres quickly. The reason I am writing this is to show you some of the capabilities AutoCAD has when it comes to doing calculations. Read more »

I hope you had a good weekend. As promised today I will talk about using Pi in calculations.

You can call up Pi in the CAL command by simply typing “pi” (without quotation marks). Read more »