  |
|
|
|
Dim tricks and S2M© Jonathan Jonas Here is a command that is often overlooked, but is quite powerful. Dimedit has only 4 subcommands, but without it you cannot do among other things, isometric dimensioning. The four subcommands are Home, New, Rotate and Oblique. New is pretty much a waste of time. It involves more steps and basically does the same thing as DDEDIT by editing the dimension text through your MTEXT text editor (see the command MTEXTED to change this). Should you edit the text, which is normally not advised, and you want to change it back to the default, either type in <> or delete the current text leaving it blank and ACAD will retype for you the <> symbols and it becomes once again associated to the dimension. Using DDMODIFY to modify a single dimension or DDIM to change an existing dim style or create a new one you are able to adjust the dimension text from horizontal & vertical to aligned, but you can't change it's angle to anything you want. Using the Rotate subcommand you can the text's angle to any angle you want. It's not often however that you will probably need that ability. Oblique on the other hand is very important if you need to create an isometric drawing. Drawing in iso is fairly simple to do. Turn on your ortho mode - ORTHO ON or F8 or DDRMODES. Then turn on the Isometric Snap in DDRMODES by checking the Iso On box. Next use either DDRMODES to switch between Left, Top or Right or the command ISOPLANE or F5 or CNTRL+E. and start to draw your drawing. Keep in mind that when drawing with ISOPLANE On you cannot correctly use the command OFFSET. OFFSET will give you an incorrect distance. Also remember that with ISOPLANE On you have an extra subcommand under ELLIPSE called Isocircle for drawing circles in isometric. Once you have your drawing created you need to dimension it. Use DIMALI to create your dimensions. Then go into DIMEDIT, and select Oblique, pick the dim and enter the angle for the oblique - 150 for the right side dims and 210 for the left side dims. The last thing you need to do is to adjust the text to horizontal using either DIMTIH and DIMTOH or DDMODIFY to adjust these values so that the text is horizontal. Amazingly, Autodesk doesn't consider the ability to set the dimensions correctly to isometric drawings important enough to include these simple instructions in either any of their books or the help files on the CD. Actually the blame should not be solely on Autodesk here. For some reason the majority of the books out there seem to skip over this as well. |
|
|
|
