You may have noticed that when you attempt to delete a layer that is being used by entities in your drawing you will be denied.

There is, however, an easy way to delete layers that are being used by entities. Read more »

This just in: “It is time to cast your votes for your favorite Autodesk product improvement wishes for the February 2009 cycle. The ballots, populated with the wishes submitted by your fellow AUGI members, are live and awaiting your votes.” Read more »

I just found out from @MisterAU on Twitter that Autodesk has a channel on YouTube. Looking over a few of the videos it looks like a lot of marketing promos and videos showing overviews of various Autodesk software. Read more »

According to the AutoCAD help file, “Reconciling new layers is the process of manually reviewing new layers so that you can avoid potential errors before plotting your drawing or when restoring a layer state.” Read more »

I hope you had a good New Years. I sure did! I’m just getting back to blogging after a holiday break.

Have you ever been frustrated that your hatch patterns always cover other objects no matter how many times you set the draw order to send it to back? Read more »

I just read an excellent tutorial by David Watson at CADTutor.net. David writes, “AutoCAD can be used to create a simple “walk through” of any 3D model. For example, if you have designed a new pedestrianisation scheme for a town centre, you could use AutoCAD to give a slide presentation to show how the scheme would look from a pedestrian eye view as the person moved through the space. This is an extremely useful technique for presenting schemes to clients or the general public who may not necessarily have a good understanding of plans.” Read more »

I am trying to understand why companies use the “unitless” insertion scale (UNITS, INSUNITS) in their drawings as a standard. I’m sure there are uses for it, but I am having a hard time understanding. If you set your drawings to “unitless”, leave a comment here and tell me your reasoning. Read more »

I was one of those guys carrying around a MacBook at Autodesk University. The main reasons I took it was to blog and check email, but throughout the week I found myself wishing that Autodesk would make AutoCAD run natively on Mac OSX. Read more »

Matt Murphy showed this tip in a class at Autodesk University. He explained that AutoCAD attaches XData to objects in drawings and this data allows information to be associated with specific objects. The problem is that when objects that contained XData are deleted from the drawing, the registered application becomes unreferenced. If you get a large amount of unreferenced registered applications in a file, it can increase the file size and cause sluggish performance. Read more »

Erhan Toker from the DailyAutoCAD.com website posted an excellent tutorial on using the command LENGTHEN. He said, “Most of the time; we use TRIM and EXTEND for editing the lengths of objects. However, we may wish to define the length of an object to a certain value. This is when the LENGTHEN command comes in handy.” Check it out…

The party that took place the evening of day 3 was incredible. There was a lot of entertainment, good food, and beer. I really enjoyed watching people do bungee jumping on a trampoline. Good times! Read more »