Add wall finishes to office layouts using AutoCAD. This process requires a keen eye for precision, as this tutorial delves into creating neat and clean finishes for office walls, ensuring a professional and tidy result.
Key Insights
- The article details the process of creating wall finishes using AutoCAD, starting with changing the current layer to I-A-N-O finishes and drawing guidelines for proper alignment and precision.
- The importance of creating neat lines in office layouts is emphasized. This is achieved by setting the width to zero for a normal AutoCAD line, ensuring the line is exactly three feet and at an angle of 45 degrees, and making use of the midpoint for a clean finish.
- The tutorial also highlights the process of adding tags such as paint or wall covering, copying and trimming lines, and adding finishing touches to corners. These steps are essential in creating a professional and aesthetically pleasing office layout.
This lesson is a preview from our AutoCAD for Interior Design Course Online (includes software) and Interior Design Professional Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Now let's add our wall finishes for these offices. We'll begin by going to layer L-A-Y-E-R and let's change our current layer to I-A-N-O finishes. Now I like to make my finish lines really neat.
They don't have to be, some people will just simply draw some really basic lines, L-I-N-E, and they'll just click with ortho off and they'll go from here to here and they'll put their tag something like this. There we go, and that's a super fast way to do it and I have no fault in that, but I like to make mine neat. But no, there's another way out there, you can just do it super quick like that.
Let's go ahead and do the neat and clean way. So what we're going to do is draw a couple of guidelines first. So L-I-N-E and click right at that office corner, top right corner, click one time, move my cursor away.
Now I will type in three feet and then tab and then 45 for 45 degrees and then enter. What does that give me? It gives me exactly a three foot line, exactly 45 on the angle. All right, now let's copy that a couple times.
I'm going to select it, C-O to copy, and I want one at the corner, one on the far left, and one down where these two walls meet. So I've got three guidelines and now we'll go back to our awesome P-line tool, P-L-I-N-E, and we'll click our starting point which will be down on this left corner here. Click one time, pull our cursor away, but don't click because what's happening? We've got that really thick line from our code plan.
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We need to click on W or scroll down to width. And how do we go back to just a regular AutoCAD line? We change our width to zero. So type in zero, enter for our starting point, and zero, enter for our ending point.
And now we're back to a normal line, no problem. Now I made those lines three feet on purpose so that I can go out one foot six at the midpoint. Tricky, right? Click that midpoint, click that midpoint, click the midpoint, and then back to the corner, click and enter to be done.
To make sure I did that correctly, I can select it or hover over it, and I'll notice that I'm grabbing that whole outside corner of the wall. Now why did I make those guidelines extra long? That's because they're really easy to select and delete when the time comes. All right, so let's go ahead and select that top one, select it, hit delete.
And now we want to add our tag, which is paint one. So let's grab a paint one from somewhere else. I'll grab this, C O to copy.
I'm going to grab right in the center of it and click right on that corner, click and escape. Now my last step is to trim out these extra lines, T R on my keyboard to trim. Trim that line, I don't need it, and that line.
And it looks really clean, and that's the clean but a little bit longer way to do it. But let's go ahead and continue with that method. Now I want to first change what this is.
I have on this outside wall a wall covering, like wallpaper. And so let's do W C for wall covering. So I double click on the PT1 and do W C and let's do W C 1 and click OK.
So that's wall covering 1. All right, so let's do another. Let's grab one of these lines. We only made one and we can just copy it around.
So C O to copy. I'm going to grab right in that corner, click on that outside corner of the junior office, and then all the way down here. That covers that.
I'll hit escape and then P line, P L I N E. Start in the bottom here, click and go to that midpoint, go to the midpoint here, midpoint there, and down to that bottom corner and enter. Okay, I don't need these guidelines anymore, so I will select all three and delete them. And now I need that paint tag again.
I'll select it right here, C O to copy, grab right in the center, go to this outside corner, click and T R to trim. So trim away this, trim away that. I got a little extra line there, so I will trim both of those away.
And that looks really good. Go ahead and hit ENTER and let's keep going. Okay, so we've got that PT1, that white paint.
And just as a quick aside, why did I end this at the corner? It can be a great way to end our finishes on an inside corner. So it's kind of a default place to end our finishes. On an outside corner, it can be tricky.
Imagine wallpaper coming out here and stopping. How do you finish the hat? You'd probably have to put some trim over it or some way to cover it. If you wrap it all the way to the inside corner, it can just stop there and continue on.
If you're not sure, when in doubt, that's kind of one of those rules of thumb, but rules of thumb can be broken. Okay, now let's paint the inside of our offices. We'll start with the executive office.
We know that we have these outside warehouse walls and they're brick, they're beautiful, we're not touching them. So those don't get a finish, but we do want to paint the inside of our office. We want to give a nice gray colored paint and it's PT2.
So to do that, we need to get some guides going. Let's grab this guide CO to copy. We'll copy it and place it right here.
Make sure I snap right to that inside corner and click. There it is. Now I need a guide running the opposite direction.
So let's do our little trick again. We do line, L-I-N-E, click right on this bottom inside corner, click one time, move my mouse up. I will type in manually three feet, tab, and now this is going to be 135 because it's doing the larger outside angle.
