Tuesday

Plotting Render and Drawing Together in Layouts

5 Comments Mar-24-2009 | Posted by Erhan Toker | Printable Version | Level |

After AutoCAD 2005, it is now available to plot the draft drawing and photorealistic ( render ) drawings in Layout ( Paperspace ) print outs.

Fig. 1

As you can see in Fig. 1 you can send plan, frontal view and rendered perspective together in the same page to the printer or plotter. Since the PAPERSPACE command is added to AutoCAD ( AutoCAD R12 ), a new way of plotting has been available in AutoCAD. Usual black screen ( model space ) is now our real drawing area and the new white screen ( paper space ) with triangular coordinate system icon is our new layout screen ( Fig.1 ). Now we are able to open up new layouts as many as we want and we are able to draw submission elements like layouts, letterheads etc. This field, which has some features lacking at the beginning, is now complete with AutoCAD 2005 version.

While preparing layout pages ( layout ), the main approach is to open new viewports from our usual black screen. These viewports may be rectangles, circles or polygon shaped. But, in general we are using rectangles. Regarding this subject, Eren Pala had prepared the related detailed article . ERASE, STRETCH, and other commands also work for the MVIEW entities, just like they do for LINE, CIRCLE entities. Starting with AutoCAD 2005, new features were added to MVIEW properties about RENDER.

Fig. 2

In Fig. 2, you can see the properties of MVIEW entity in AutoCAD 2007. If you right click on any MVIEW frame and enter PROPERTIES command, relevant tool panel will open up, and you can make changes in the settings of MVIEW. On the bottom part, in Shade Plot options, you can mark up what kind of a print out you would like to take. By using Realistic ( In early versions it is Rendered ), you specify that you would like to take a photorealistic print out of this viewport. The other viewports will be plotted by using the usual draft style.

Note that: Did you know that DWG to PDF.pc3 inside the printer list of AutoCAD 2007 is a virtual printer that can directly print to PDF files?