Are you new to AutoCAD? Have you been using AutoCAD for years but only use the blocks, styles, layers and tools that others have created? Do you want to learn more or step up your game on features you’re not very strong in and pick up some practical examples of best practices? If so, this series is for you. Over the course of 12 months and maybe more I will cover the basics of a lot of AutoCAD tools and features that many may want or need to learn more about.
This is the 6th article in my AutoCAD 101 series – to read about the origination for this series, see the first post here: <Intro> The last post in this series was about “important stuff” to consider when making blocks <link>, this post will be about diving in to Dynamic Blocks.
We have wrapped up the basics of blocks in the past few posts, so let’s get in to some more advanced block work and look at Dynamic Blocks.
In the course of a design day or projects timeline blocks are moved, copied, mirrored, rotated and sometimes completely replaced. An efficient way to reduce your work load and speed up some of these changes is to use dynamic blocks. Dynamic blocks were introduced in AutoCAD 2006 and can be created and used in AutoCAD LT as we’ll. Creating blocks that have dynamic properties or adding dynamic properties to an existing block will enhance the block’s usability and can greatly reduce block counts. In the next few posts I am going to go over some basic features of Dynamic blocks that can make your regular blocks more flexible and save you editing time.
For the first post I’ll just discuss the options I will be covering moving forward and in the next post I will dig in with examples.
Dynamic blocks basically have two parts ‘Parameters’ and ‘Actions’. Parameters are the defining points or properties of your block and the Actions are what gets done with or to the block.
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The Parameters that I will be covering are:
The coverage will not be in this order; it will be based on a building of features. |
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The Associated Actions I will be covering are:
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Obviously there are more Parameters and Actions available, but I believe that the ones discussed here are the most commonly used for a variety of situations. Plus, I need to leave a few for you to learn on your own! In the next post I’ll dive in to the easiest and most impactful – Visibility States .
WES
