CADTutor

Learn AutoCAD with our Free Tutorials

Welcome to CADTutor

CADTutor provides the best free tutorials and articles for AutoCAD, 3ds Max and associated applications along with a friendly community forum. If you need to learn AutoCAD, or you want to be more productive, you're in the right place. See our tip of the day to start learning right now!

Free Tutorials and More…

The Tutorials section provides over 100 original tutorials for AutoCAD, 3ds Max and other design applications. Michael’s Corner is an archive of productivity articles that brings you the best AutoCAD tips and tricks. Our Forum is a lively community where AutoCAD users can ask questions and get answers. The Downloads area provides free AutoCAD blocks, free AutoLISP routines and free images.

Tutorials of the Moment

Recently viewed tutorials

CADTutor Tutorials

Our tutorials are comprehensive but straightforward introductions to AutoCAD and related software. They are designed to help beginners get to grips with design workflows as quickly as possible. There are over 100 to choose from, some text/image based and others in video format. Whatever stage you are at in your learning, you should find a tutorial to help.

Forum Latest

Currently Active Topics

This Week's Hot Topics

CADTutor Forums

Our forum is a vibrant community of experts and beginners. The main focus is helping beginners get to grips with AutoCAD and to help more advanced users become more productive. The AutoLISP forum is one of the busiest out there, providing expert advice for busy professionals.

AutoCAD Productivity

Possible Solutions to the Disappearing Drawing

by Michael Beall

From: AutoCAD Productivity Articles #142
Originally published: October 2015

Purge dialog boxMany of my customers encounter a situation where the drawing disappears when they change the view or use Zoom Extents. Here are a few of my suggestions that I'm beginning to include in all my training sessions:

  1. Purge and Audit a drawing you inherit or haven't worked on in a while. In the Purge command, if the two boxes under Unnamed Objects are ‘live’, check them both.

  2. Save the current layer condition as a layer state, then turn On and Thaw all layers. Objects that are on layers that are Off are still ‘seen’ when you Zoom Extents. Saving the layer state will give a fallback position, just in case.

  3. Set the QTEXT (Quick Text) feature to ON, then Regen the drawing. Turning on Qtext will replace all text objects with boxes and may make the dots around the perimeter of the screen easier to see. This feature was used extensively in the early days of pen plotters when it just took too long — albeit very entertaining over a lunch hour — to plot drawings with a lot of text. Instead of pppllloootttiiinnnggg out each letter, it just drew a quick 4-sided bounding box around the text. (Set QTEXT back to OFF when you're finished.)

  4. Set PDMODE to 35 to display Points in the Circle-X format. All my furniture/facilities customers have drawings with Point objects on the insertion points and other vital locations on their furniture. Setting the PDMODE — Point Display Mode — to 35 makes any floating Point object visible. (Set PDMODE back to 0 to go back to the default condition of dots.)

After all's said and done, hopefully you will see the misbehaving object that's keeping your drawing from displaying as you expected. At that point, you can either move those objects back among their peers… or simply delete 'em. That's your call, but at least now you know what that problem was!

See all the articles published in October 2015

Michael's Corner

Between 2003 and 2016, Michael Beall (and one or two guests) wrote almost 600 articles for CADTutor. The focus of these articles is AutoCAD productivity, and although some of them are now more than a few years old, most remain relevant to current versions of AutoCAD. The article above is just one example. Check out Michael's Corner for a full listing.

Tip of the Day

Using Imprint to sub-divide faces

Imprint in actionThe Imprint command (Modify ❯ Solid Editing ❯ Imprint Edges) gives the first impression of nothing more than adding graffiti to solids. Upon closer investigation, however, we find that it actually modifies the face on which it is placed, effectively sub-dividing it. Sub-divided faces can then be extruded using the Extrude faces command (Modify ❯ Solid Editing ❯ Extrude faces).

Procedure

  1. Create a box.
  2. Draw a line on one of the faces.
  3. Imprint that line on the solid.
  4. Use Extrude faces to extrude the sub-divided face.

To generate this modified part with Boolean operations would not be difficult but, as we all know, speed and accuracy are the name of the game. The procedure describe above can be auto-executed with the command macro:

^C^C_line;\\;_solidedit;b;i;\last;y;;;f;E;\;\\;;

The UI could benefit from some advanced programming, but if one pays attention to the Command Prompts, it's not so bad.

Note: This tip relates to versions of AutoCAD before 2007. Although the technique works with 2007 and above, the same operation can be achieved more easily using the Presspull tool.

Today's tip is by SEANT

Missed a Tip?

Did you miss yesterday's tip? Maybe you forgot to drop by or maybe you don't visit over the weekend. If so, you can now see all the tips published during the past week. Also, if you have a tip you'd like to share with us, you can post it on our forum and if we like it, we'll publish it here.