Mastering the right techniques for blocking out elevation in AutoCAD can significantly improve your architectural plans. This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to achieve this, taking you through the different stages and considerations involved in this process.
Key Insights
- The article details how to block out elevation using the structural core of a building. This involves turning off the brick layer, and creating lines based on the floor plan and the specified levels of the building.
- The guide recommends using a circle to find distances while working. This technique involves drawing a circle from the midpoint of a line, which aids in quickly setting a radius, diameter and two quadrants.
- The author suggests using the construction line (X line) feature in AutoCAD to capture every piece of major geometry. This includes the edges of walls, doors, and windows, and helps to better visualize the architectural plan.
This lesson is a preview from our CAD Certificate Course Online (includes software) and AutoCAD Certification Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Let's start blocking out our elevation. For now, I don't need my blocks palette.
I'll close that, and let's zoom in on the front of the garage and talk very quickly about where we want to bring our lines from. Traditionally, AutoCAD plans and architectural plans in general were drawn either from the edge of your finished material or from the edge of your core, your structural material. Now, we could draw this elevation using just the structural material, if I turned off this brick layer and pretended that this was the face of my wall all the way across, this would be a traditional workflow.
In fact, you'll still see some offices doing exactly that for all of their elevation views. They will draw to what the structural core is because that's how they dimension their floor plans as well. In this case, what I want to do for our walls is we're going to need to know the height of this geometry because that's our structural wall, but I'm eventually going to want to see this geometry, which is our brick.
We're going to block out the elevation using our structural core, these points here and here. I am going to hide the brick layer. Then when we start to finish our elevations, I'll turn that brick layer back on, and it'll be very simple to bring down our extra geometry.
For now, go ahead and go layoff and turn off the brick layer, but don't worry, we'll turn that back on towards the end of this elevation and make sure that we're accurately representing our geometry. In order to block out this elevation, we're going to need two things. We're going to need to pull down our geometry from the floor plan, and we're going to need the two levels you see on your handout, finish floor level and top of plate.
Learn AutoCAD
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
There's a third line, which is our grade level, which is 6 inches below the finish floor. You can see that our top of plate goes up 8 feet 1 inches from the finish floor. We also have a dimension for the height of the windows, the head height of the windows.
Let's start by creating those lines relative to our no plot. I'm going to come down to the no plot. We're going to probably move and adjust our elevation a couple of times to make it fit into our no plot as we go.
For now, I'm just going to choose this line at the bottom of these three as the location for my ground. We'll go 6 inches up from that and then an additional 8 feet 1 up to our top of plate. There's no quick and easy way to draw a line from a center point, so I'm going to show you a fast trick.
I'm going to first go to my sea ground layer and I'm going to draw a circle. A circle sets a radius or a diameter and two quadrants will be set at the left and right. If I find the midpoint of this line and draw a circle, in this case I'm going to make it just wider than my building.
You can see here I'm using my crosshairs to go up and I'm checking the size of my distance. This is 33 feet or so. I'm going to type 34 feet, enter.
My radius is roughly 34 feet, well it's exactly 34 feet, which makes my ground line in this case 68 feet wide. That doesn't matter much except to say now I can go line from the quadrant to the quadrant, enter to say I'm done. Because my circle was drawn from the center and I was able to use my crosshairs to find roughly wider than the building, I didn't need to do many more precise measurements.
I'll select the circle, hit delete, and zoom in. You could have done that lots of ways by extending the edges of the building and offsetting three or four feet, but that's just a quick trick. Use circles to find distances while you're working.
Now we have our ground line and let's offset those finished floor lines as well. I'll go 0, enter, 6, enter, grabbing my green line and going up, enter to say I'm done, enter to go back in, 8 feet 1 inch, enter, and I'll choose this and go up, enter to say I'm done. Let's grab those top two lines and migrate them to the A finished floor layer.
Escape, escape, escape, zoom extents, control s to save. I'm actually going to go up to my layer properties and hide my A no plot layer so that that no plot is gone for a short term. We don't need it while we block out the elevation.
I'm going to go up and choose my A medium layer as my active layer to start bringing down some of the wall geometry. Eventually we'll be migrating lines to A light or A heavy, but for now I'll just start working in A medium. I'm going to use a construction line, an X line, XL, enter.
I'm going to use vertical, V, enter, and I'm going to go into my building starting on this left side and I'm going to click every piece of major geometry. You could start with just the walls if it was a large elevation. In this case I'm going to get walls, doors, and windows, and we should be able to see those fairly well.
I'm going to pick here, here, here, and go all the way across your elevation getting all of the edges of the windows and of this front door. There's going to be two garage door openings and there we go. Enter to say I'm done.
We can see that this is going to be a door, a door, front door, window, window, and the rest of those lines are going to be the walls. So I'll hit escape and undo to cancel my hatch. Now I'll go trim, TR, enter, T, enter for cutting lines.
I'll zoom in and pick my green line and this top red line, enter, and I'm going to use the fence tool to chop these off at the top and trim these out at the bottom. Enter to say I'm done. Now to make this very clear, I'm going to migrate the wall layers to A heavy.
So that's this line, two garage doors, and this line, the front door, here, and here, and then the one on the left. So it's going to be one line, two for the window, one line, two for the window, two for the door, and then the double door for the garage. I'm going to migrate these to the A heavy layer, escape, escape, and that helps me a lot to visualize what's going to be a door or a window and what's going to be my wall geometry.
In order to make this ground line appear a little bit more solid, I'm going to convert it to a polyline and change its width. So let's go PE for polyline edit, choose this green line at the bottom. Do you want to turn it into a polyline? Yes, enter.
