Immerse yourself in the practical world of construction document creation with the AutoCAD Construction Documents 1, CAD 301 course, where you will be working on floor plans, elevation plans, and detail plans for a real-world residential project. This course includes practical exercises and template usage, providing a solid foundation for further development in the Construction Documents 2 and 3 courses.
Key Insights
- The course guides students through the creation of construction documents for a real-world, one-story, four-bedroom residential project. Students build a floor plan, roof plan, elevation plan, and three detailed plans for the floor plan.
- Course materials include a VDCI Construction Documents template, which has a few extra dimension styles, and a 22 x 34, which is an ANSI D paper space page size, enabling students to work on more complex documents. This template is used throughout the course and can also be utilized in the Construction Documents 2 and 3 courses.
- As part of the course, students are shown how to use the Design Center in AutoCAD to bring in layers from a drawing put together specifically for this course, thereby integrating the various aspects of construction document creation.
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.
Welcome to the Virtual Design and Construction Institute course, AutoCAD Construction Documents 1, CAD 301. In this course, we are going to work on construction documents for a real-world residential project that is a four-bedroom, one-story house. In this course, we are going to build a floor plan, roof plan, and elevation plan, as well as three detail plans for the floor plan.
By now, I hope you have downloaded your file downloads and have saved them on your C drive. Here, you can see I've saved my CAD 301 file downloads, and you can quickly see that we have a blocks folder with different types of blocks we will be using in this course, a keynotes folder with some text documents, and we'll talk about three different ways we can build keynotes in AutoCAD, the sheets folder, which currently has our color table file, and we will introduce that later in the course, and finally, the PDF handouts and some elevation and plan layers drawings that we're going to use to bring in some layers. If we check PDF handouts, please feel free to explore these on your own, but we will be working on three sheets, A201, A202, and A301.
We will create more sheets for the same project in our Construction Documents 2 and Construction Documents 3 courses. One final thing, you'll notice that we have a VDCI Construction Documents template. In our Introduction and Intermediate courses, we used the VDCI Fundamentals template, which only had 8.5 X 11 and 11 X 17 paper space.
We are going to use this Construction Documents template, which has a few extra dimension styles, and a 22 X 34, which is an ANSI D paper space page size. Okay, so let's get started. Let's jump into AutoCAD, and I'm just going to put this over here for now.
Let's go File, New, and the first thing I want to do is make sure that our VDCI Construction Documents template is located in the AutoCAD Select Template folder. And again, this folder is in your app data, and you can find this online, but if you go File, New, and the Select Template location opens anyway, we can simply paste our template file here, and you can see that I have the VDCI Fundamentals template already in this location from my previous courses. I'll come over into my CAD301 file downloads, select my VDCI CD template, right-click, Copy.
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Then I'll come back into AutoCAD, go into this window, find some white space, and right-click, Paste. And there we go. The VDCI CD template is now located in this folder, and we can use this for the remainder of our course and for our Construction Documents 2 and 3 courses.
I'll use the VDCI Construction Documents template, and I'll hit Open. Now I'd like to save this as our CAD301 plan model. So I'll go File, Save.
I'm going to browse to my C drive and find CAD301 file downloads, and again, you may have saved this in your My Documents or Desktop location. That's fine. Just find your file downloads.
And here I'm going to click on 301 Plan Layers, and I'll backspace and get rid of the word Layers and write Model. Again, this will be our model file for our plan view. I'll hit Save, and now that we have our drawing saved, I'd like to bring in our layers.
We've done this before by using the Design Center, which is CTRL and 2 on the keyboard. CTRL 2. That'll open up our Design Center. You can also find it on Tools, Palettes, Design Center, Tools, Palettes, Design Center.
Now I'd like to go up to my local disk C. I'll close Program Files, and I'll unroll CAD301 file downloads, and I'll find Plan Layers. This is a drawing we've put together that just has the layers that we are going to use for this plan model. It has no other geometry in it.
I can now select all of these layers with a window and click and drag them into my drawing. You'll see the little arrow appears, and if I check the Layers dropdown, we now have all of the layers in our drawing. Excellent.
We can close the Design Center and CTRL S to save. As a reminder, you can see that we have the VDCI 22x34 paper space page size in our VDCI construction documents template, and we will use that when we set up our sheet files in the future. To end this video, I'd like to open up the PDF of the CAD301 plan model, and I would suggest that you print this PDF out.
You'll notice that this PDF does not have a title block, so it is not to scale, but you can print this PDF out and follow along with the dimensions. If I zoom in, I can see the dimensions clearly, but when I'm zoomed all the way out, it will not be so helpful. When I am going through this course, I will not be referencing the PDF on screen.
Instead, I suggest that you have it either in a PDF reader on a second monitor, or better yet, print it out in front of you at 11 × 17. If you want to print this out at full size, I suggest you do that at a local print shop or FedEx or something like that, but 11 × 17 should show you the dimensions clearly enough for you to follow along with the course. I'm excited about the Construction Documents course series as we will work through some real-world course projects, and I hope you're excited too.
We will get into floor plans, elevations, building sections, details, and more, and I'm very excited to have you join us in this AutoCAD journey. In the next video, we will work on our floor plan walls. I'll see you there!
