832 Part IV Drawing in Three Dimensions

Figure 25-24: You can include your rendered images in your drawings.

Unloading Render

When you render, a minimized Render window may open. Closing the Render window when you’re finished rendering frees up memory for other tasks. You can close the Render window by clicking its Close box.

Summary

In this chapter, I covered the process of rendering. You read about the following:

Creating lights

Creating scenes

Importing and creating materials

Attaching materials

Using backgrounds

Rendering a drawing

This chapter ends Part IV, “Drawing in Three Dimensions.” Part V, “Organizing and Managing Drawings,” explains how to manage drawings, work with other applications and file types, and use AutoCAD on the Internet.

836 Part V Organizing and Managing Drawings

Create shortcuts to drawings and locations that you use most often.

Search for drawings and named drawing components.

Open drawings by dragging them into the drawing area.

Create tools for your tool palettes.

View and insert raster image files by dragging them into the drawing area.

Navigating with the DesignCenter

To open the DesignCenter, choose DesignCenter from the Standard toolbar, or choose Tools DesignCenter. As a shortcut, press Ctrl+2. The DesignCenter appears as shown

in Figure 26-1. Four tabs provide access to folders, open drawings, history, and DC Online, where you can find content provided by Autodesk, manufacturers, and other users.

Figure 26-1: The DesignCenter with the Folders tab displayed.

The Folders tab displays a tree view of any location — your hard drive, network, or the Internet — that you can access. This tree view is very similar to that of Windows Explorer. Click the plus sign next to a drive or folder to display its contents. Use the vertical scroll bar to display any location.

A selected drawing displays its named components in the content area on the right side of the palette. (Use the Views drop-down list to choose the type of display that you want.) You can also click the plus sign next to a drawing to display these components in the tree view. Then click a component type, such as blocks, to see a list of the blocks in the drawing, as shown in Figure 26-1. Click Preview on the DesignCenter toolbar to see a preview in the preview pane of blocks, drawings, and raster images. Click Description to display a description, if one is saved.

After you narrow your search, you may want to click Tree View Toggle to toggle off the tree view, thus hiding the navigation pane. By default, the navigation pane displays your

desktop, including the files and folders on your hard drive and network. To narrow your search, you can click two other tabs from the DesignCenter:

The Open Drawings tab displays currently open drawings.

The History tab displays the most recently opened drawings.

Finding named components and drawings

What do you do if you don’t know the location of the drawing that you want? Suppose you know the name of the layer, but not the name of the drawing that contains that layer. The DesignCenter includes a Search feature to help you.

Choose Search from the DesignCenter toolbar to open the Search window, shown in Figure 26-2. (You can also right-click in the Content area and choose Search.)

Figure 26-2: Use the Search window to locate drawings and drawing components.

Here’s how to use the Search window:

Click the Look For drop-down list to choose what you’re looking for. You can look for blocks, dimension styles, drawings, drawings and blocks, hatch pattern files, hatch patterns, layers, layouts, linetypes, table styles, text styles, and xrefs.

Click the In drop-down list to specify the drive that you want to search. By default, the Search subfolders check box is checked so that the search looks in all folders and subfolders within the drive.

Use the tabbed area to specify the name of the components that you’re looking for. The tab’s name and content change, depending on what you chose in the Look For dropdown list. For example, if you chose Layers, the tab is called Layers and asks you for the name of the layer. If you’re looking for drawings, you have three tabs to work with:

•The Drawings tab enables you to look for a drawing by file name (the default), title, subject, author, or keywords. Choose one of these options in the In the Field(s) drop-down list. Then type the text that you want to look for in the Search

838 Part V Organizing and Managing Drawings

For more information on searching for drawings, see the section “Finding drawings” later in this chapter.

Using the Favorites folder

The Favorites folder is a Windows convention that helps you to find files that you use often. This folder contains shortcuts to actual files. The files remain in their original locations. Choosing a file from the Favorites folder has the same effect as choosing the file from its source location.

You’ll find an Autodesk subfolder within the Favorites folder, where you can store shortcuts to drawings and other files that you use often. You can then easily open the Favorites folder and find these files. Favorites is one possible place to keep drawings that contain block libraries.

To add a shortcut to Favorites, right-click the drawing (or other file) in the DesignCenter and choose Add to Favorites.

To access the drawings in Favorites, click Favorites on the DesignCenter toolbar. You can also right-click the content pane and choose Favorites. The Favorites folder appears

in the content pane.

To move, copy, or delete shortcuts from Favorites, right-click the content pane and choose Organize Favorites.

Accessing named drawing components

As soon as you have the item that you need in the Content area, you need to insert it into your drawing. If you used the Search window to locate a file, then you can also insert directly from the results that you find. You can either drag the item onto the drawing area or rightclick it and choose an option. Sometimes these two methods provide slightly different results. In this section, I explain how to insert drawing components into your drawing.

Inserting drawings

You can insert an entire drawing into your drawing. Choose the drawing’s folder in the navigation pane so that the drawing appears in the content area. Drag the drawing’s icon onto the drawing area. The command line prompts you for an insertion point, scale, and rotation angle, using the -INSERT command.

If you right-click the drawing, you can choose to insert the drawing as a block, or attach it as an xref.

Opening drawings

You can open a drawing using the DesignCenter. Display the drawing in the content pane, right-click it, and choose Open in Application Window. The drawing opens, keeping your current drawing open as well.

Inserting blocks

In Chapter 5, I explain that you can use the Units dialog box (choose Format Units) to set a unit, such as inches, for automatically scaling drawings when they’re inserted from the DesignCenter.

You can insert blocks in two ways:

If you drag the block’s icon onto the drawing area, the drawing uses Autoscaling, which compares the current drawing’s units with those of the block, and scales the block appropriately, using the value set in the Units dialog box. The block takes on default scale and rotation.

If you double-click the block’s icon or right-click it and choose Insert Block, the Insert dialog box opens, where you can specify the insertion point, scale, and rotation.

Inserting raster images

A raster image is a bitmap graphic file. You can insert raster images directly into your drawing, as they don’t have to be within a drawing.

To attach a raster image, drag its icon onto the drawing area. The command line prompts you for an insertion point, scale, and rotation angle.

Tip Knowing the appropriate scale of an image before inserting it is often difficult. When you move the cursor at the Specify scale factor or [Unit] <1>: prompt, you can see a bounding box that will help you visualize the resulting size of the image.

Attaching an xref

To attach or overlay an xref, right-click its icon and choose Attach as Xref to open the External Reference dialog box. Choose either Attachment or Overlay in the Reference Type section. Specify an insertion point, scale, and rotation (or choose to specify them on-screen), and click OK.

If you drag the xref onto the drawing area, you see prompts on the command line that are similar to those of the INSERT command.

840 Part V Organizing and Managing Drawings

Inserting layers and styles

To insert a layer, layout, linetype, text style, table style, or dimension style into a drawing, drag its icon onto the drawing area. Of course, these items don’t appear in your drawing area, but they’re added to the drawing’s database.

You can drag multiple items at one time. To select a contiguous group, click the first item, press and hold Shift, and click the last item. To select individual multiple items, click the first item, press and hold Ctrl, and click any other item that you want to insert. You can also double-click an item to insert it.

Your drawing does not check for duplicate layer names. If you try to insert a layer with the same name as a layer in your current drawing, you see a message: Layer(s) added. Duplicate definitions will be ignored. You should check for duplicate layer names before trying to insert layers from the DesignCenter.

Inserting content from DC Online

The DC Online tab provides access to online resources, including standard parts and manufacturers’ information. Figure 26-3 shows some of the DC Online content. To insert any content, select it and drag it into your drawing. Follow the prompts for insertion point, scale, and rotation.

Figure 26-3: The DC Online tab of the DesignCenter offers a large selection of content that you can drag into your drawing.

Controlling the DesignCenter display

The DesignCenter provides several controls that help you manage its display.

A great feature of the DesignCenter is the preview pane. Click Preview and select the item in the content pane. You may or may not see a preview of a block. (The new Block

Definition dialog box specifically lets you create a preview icon.) Usually, you’ll see a preview of drawings and raster images. No previews exist for layers, linetypes, text styles, and so on.

If you saved a description with a block, select the block in the content pane and click Description on the DesignCenter toolbar to see the description.

To set the view, choose Views from the DesignCenter toolbar. The drop-down arrow lets you choose from four types of displays: large icons, small icons, list, and details.

If you make changes in the structure of a folder while the DesignCenter is open — for example, by deleting a drawing using Windows Explorer — right-click the navigation or content pane and choose Refresh. The DesignCenter re-reads the data and refreshes the list.

STEPS: Using the DesignCenter

1.Open ab26a-dwg from the CD-ROM.

2.Save the file as ab26-01.dwg in your AutoCAD Bible folder. This drawing needs an updated set of layers and a title block. It is shown in Figure 26-4.

Figure 26-4: This drawing needs updated layers and a title block.

Thanks to Vladimir Sevastyanov of Ukraine for this drawing of a gyrating swivel that feeds oil to an uncoiling machine used in the cold rolling of metal.

3.Choose DesignCenter from the Standard toolbar. If the navigation pane is not displayed, click Tree View Toggle on the DesignCenter toolbar.