Explore the process of working on an attic vent in AutoCAD. Learn how to effectively use features like tracking, dividing lines into equal segments, and creating equally spaced copies using nodes.
Key Insights
- The attic vent is one foot and one inch by one foot and one inch featuring a three and a half inch trim. It is positioned 11 feet five and a half inches from a reference point and rises up 18 inches.
- The AutoCAD divide tool can split a line into equal segments. This feature comes handy while adding louvers to the attic vent. Using the divide tool, the line can be divided into five equal segments to represent the louvers.
- The attic vent is duplicated on the other side of the design using the right block (wb) command. Tracking is used to accurately position the second vent based on the dimension reference from the first vent.
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Let's start to work on our attic vent. Let's zoom in on our Left elevation where we can see some interesting data.
The attic vent is one foot and one inch by one foot and one inch. It also has a three and a half inch trim around it, and it has some horizontal lines that represent louvers. Now we can see where the corner is located by looking at the dimension.
Eleven feet five and a half inches from this point and then it goes up one foot six inches for a total of 18 inches. We can place our rectangle automatically in one command. Let's do that together.
I'll go to the Home tab and choose rectangle. I need to find the point here, but to do that I need to start on geometry I know. Let's start over here.
Now I want the point here where this wall originally intersected with the Top of Plate, but we trimmed that away. That's okay. We can go TRA, Enter for tracking, and we can just start at the endpoint here.
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Now my first tracking point is going to go up to the Shift+Right-click, Perpendicular of my Top of Plate. Now I'm tracking from the Top of Plate line, and I can move over to the left and type in my tracking distance, 11 feet 5.5 inches, Enter, and now we can move up one foot six or 18 inches.
Enter and Enter to say I'm done. That's the location of one corner of the rectangle. Now I can go D, Enter for dimensions, and this is one foot one by one foot one or 13, Enter, 13, Enter.
Now I just need to choose my quadrant, and of course this is the upper-left quadrant, and I'll click and now my rectangle is perfectly in line. There we go. We tracked from the top endpoint here to the Top of Plate line, over and up.
Okay let's start with our trim. We'll go Offset, 3.5, Enter, grab the rectangle and go out, click Enter to say that I'm done. Now we want to add our louvers.
In order to do that I don't know how much distance is in between them, but if we take a look it looks like there's five gaps and four lines. AutoCAD has a useful tool called divide, which allows us to divide a line into equal line segments. In order to do that though we need a line, so this rectangle needs to be exploded.
Go ahead and grab the rectangle and hit explode, and now you can see I have a line segment on the side here. If I go to the Draw panel you can see divide right here. I'll hit divide. It'll say Select object to divide.
I'll choose this line segment and the number of segments is going to be five, Enter, and you'll see some X's appear on the screen. These X's are actually nodes or points, and you can draw these individually as well, and sometimes you will see these on other people's blocks that they generate.
This could be used to represent a point in space or just a point to snap to. Points or nodes can be very helpful especially when using divide. Now we want to go down to our Object Snaps, turn on Node, and I can copy this top line down to each one of these node locations.
Let's go copy, grabbing that top line, Enter to lock it in. I'll choose this endpoint to start, and then I can snap to each node, which is a big X with a circle. When I'm done hit ENTER to say that I'm done, and there we go.
We've created copies perfectly spaced apart to make five equally distant spaces. Now the cool part about divide is it doesn't impact your existing geometry. That line is still a single line.
Instead, we just need to, with a selection window, grab just those four nodes and hit delete. There we go, our louver geometry is complete. Now let's Write Block so that we can add it to the other side of the drawing as well.
I'll go WBLOCK, Enter for Write Block, select my objects. I'll pick here, Enter to lock it in. Now the base point here is tricky.
We can choose this point or this point right in the middle of the block. In the end we want to make sure that this is a distance we can easily place on the other side of the drawing, and because in our current drawing this point is where we're dimensioned to, I'll pick the same point here. Let's Browse, and this one is just going to be called Attic-Vent and I'll hit save and okay.
Now we can see attic vent is in our drawing. If I zoom out you can see we're on the left view. Let's switch our view by going View, Right, and let's place our second attic vent right here.
Remember we'll track up, over, and up to place the attic vent. So here's attic vent. You can see I'm ready to place it in the drawing, TRA, Enter for tracking.
This is my first point. I'm going to track up to the Shift+Right-click, Perpendicular, then to the left. This is going to be 11 feet 5.5, Enter, and then up one foot six, Enter, and there we go.
Our attic vent is on the other side of our drawing. Let's go back to the Left view, Zoom Extents, and CTRL+S to save. I'll close my Blocks dialog box, and in the next video we will add in our hatches for this project.
I'll see you there.
