Monday

Creating Complex Viewports Inside Layouts

13 Comments Feb-02-2009 | Posted by Erhan Toker | Printable Version | Level |

This time, I will mention about the concept of layouts, which is very important in my point of view. While preparing layouts for our drawings, sometimes, it may be necessary for us to use circular windows (viewports) for details, or polygonal windows (viewports) that enclose a certain area ( Fig. 1 ).

Fig. 1.

As we have mentioned in our previous articles regarding this subject, we can open windows ( MVIEW ) inside the layouts ( PAPERSPACE / LAYOUT ), that show the certain areas in the actual drawing ( MODELSPACE ). In this article, I will explain how to open a new polygon or circular shaped MVIEW window and how to hide the boundary lines of MVIEW window while sending to plotter, so that they do not appear in the print-outs.

In order to show an example, first, we will need an appropriate drawing in our hand; in this example, I will work on a middle size kitchen drawing. After opening the relevant drawing in AutoCAD, change the name of an empty LAYOUT ( for example Layout1 ) according to the presentation we are about to make. In my example, I used the name POLYGON.

Fig. 2.

In order to change the name of the layout, I right clicked on the tab of the relevant layout and choosed RENAME ( Fig. 2 ). When a new drawing is opened, it comes with a default MVIEW window. We will create our own window by erasing this one. First of all let’s draw the L shaped polygon on the lower left corner. Let’s create our drawing with POLYLINE command.

Fig. 3.

You can draw the POLYLINE that we have drawn in Fig. 3 in any layer. We will deal with its layer after we convert the POLYLINE to MVIEW. For now on let’s forget about it. In a similar manner, let’s draw a circle on the right side of polygon and let’s not deal with its layer again. However, the rectangle shown in Fig. 1 can be drawn with the normal MVIEW command. Now, let’s convert our polygon and circle into MVIEW entity:

Command : MVIEW
[ON/ OFF/ Fit/ Shadeplot/ Lock/ Object/ Polygonal/ Restore/ 2/ 3/ 4] : o ( Object )
Select object to clip viewport: ( select polygon )

Repeat the same command over the circle. When a new viewport is created, whole model drawing is placed inside the viewport by default. In order to adjust this, you have to enter inside the viewport and change the zoom values. To do this, you must double click inside the borders of the relevant viewport.

Fig. 4.

If you did it correctly, then the MVIEW frame will be thickened and triangular shaped paper icon will turn into UCS icon as shown in Fig. 4. and your cursor will not go out of this window. Under these conditions, you can make your changes with normal zoom commands. We have mentioned about the scale concept before. Due to the fact that, we are sending our layouts to plotter by 1:1 scale, we can use “ZOOM / 1/2XP” for plotting a project with 1:20 scale. Later on you can use PAN command to align our drawing inside the viewport. After completing the zoom and pan adjustment for the other viewports, let’s go back to the layout space to arrange the layout, by using PAPERSPACE ( short : PS ) command or by double-clicking outside the viewport. As soon as you go back to layout space, the icon should turn back into triangular shape. After this, now it is time to adjust the layers of our viewports. Let’s enter LAYER command and create a new layer with the name of MVIEWCERCEVE. Let’s turn off the plotting property of this layer ( Fig. 5 ).

Fig. 5.

If you turn off the PLOT property of a layer, entities drawn in this layer are not plotted. After creating the layer, we can prevent all of our MVIEW viewports to be sent to plotter by assigning all of them to the new created layer. Of course, you may want these boundary frames to be shown either. If so, you should arrange the layer settings accordingly.

I wish you good works.