Examine the detailed process of constructing and refining a house's interior structure using AutoCAD. This professional guide delves into the specifics of wall adjustments, trimmings, offsets, and dimensioning—essential skills for anyone operating in the realm of architectural drafting and design.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on how to adjust walls, apply fillets and trims to refine their structure, and use offsets for dimensioning in AutoCAD. This process helps create a more precise architectural design layout.
- The use of cutting edges is emphasized when intersecting with other geometrical structures. This method assists in maintaining accurate wall joints, which is crucial for the overall design integrity.
- Dimension strings and offsets form the basis for setting up and positioning the interior wall structure, as demonstrated in the process of designing a bathroom. Mastering these features enhances the ability to create accurate and precisely scaled architectural designs in AutoCAD.
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Let's continue with our walls. Let's zoom in and work on this part of the house right here.
As I zoom in, we can see that we have an interesting situation. The exterior wall, which is our front door, extends to the left and meets up with an extension of this short wall right here. We can do that with fillets.
I'll go fillet from the line on the left to the line on the top, enter to go back in, from the line on the right to the line on the bottom. There we go. Now we can see the front door wall extends to the left and this short wall is now much, much taller.
I can go TR enter to trim and I'll zoom in even further and trim these pieces out. There we go. We've created the small bedroom here and notice it doesn't have a bump-in closet like these rooms.
Instead, it has a square closet at the end of this hallway. That's an easy offset of four feet seven inches from the exterior wall up and then six inches back down. I'll go O enter for offset, four feet seven, enter.
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That's from this line up, click, enter to say I'm done, enter to go back in, six, enter, and that comes back down. Enter to say I'm done. Now we can do a trim and I'll choose this edge here as a cutting edge.
Remember when it intersects a lot of other geometry, we really want to be using cutting edges. I'll go trim, T enter for cutting edge, choosing this edge right here, enter, and then I'll trim both of those out, enter to say I'm done, enter to go back in, and I can clean up my wall joins here and here. All right.
Now let's look at this guest bathroom or the bathroom that's used most often by people in the living room and probably the kitchen. This one doesn't have any other geometry relating to our exterior walls, so we have to use some of our interior wall geometry to find out where these walls are going to go. If we look right here, we can see a dimension string starting that runs all the way across to there.
The first dimension is five feet six and one half inches, and it's from this wall right here. So let's do that offset and kind of set up our space from there. Offset, five feet, 6.5, enter.
That's from here to the right and click enter to say that I'm done. Now I want to find that top corner before we go anywhere else, and if I look on the dimension string here, we see that there is a built-in cabinet, and the cabinet is the same as this wall, and that is going to be five feet four from this top corner here. So let's go O, enter for offset, five feet four, enter.
From this line, up and click, enter to say I'm done. Now I can fillet those two together, and now we've created that kind of top corner of this bathroom. All right.
Before we go any further, let's trim this line a little shorter. TR, enter. T for cutting edges.
I'll choose this edge here. Enter to say I'm done. Choose that line and enter to exit my trim command.
Let's do a control S to save at that point. Now the rest of the offsets here are fairly straightforward. We can see them on the handout.
I'll zoom in on this line right here. O, enter for offset, five feet, enter. That's from this line to the right, and click, enter to say I'm done.
Enter to go back in. Now this one's three feet two inches. I'll just use that to check to see if I line up with that edge, and I do, and then I'll go offset one more time.
O, enter, two feet five, enter. I'll use this line to go to the right and click. Notice that this line is dimensioned to that corner, so we needed to use it to continue our offsets, but it's not a real-world geometry, so I'll select it and hit delete.
Now I need to offset my walls. This one is six inches to the right, and these two are six inches to the left. This one comes down.
Let's go offset, six, enter. This one to the right. Both of these go to the left, and this one comes down.
Enter to say that I'm done. To start, I'm going to use fillet, M, enter for multiple. Turning the top corner is already done, but let's turn this side, and then the interior corners here and here.
Enter to say I'm done. Now we can go trim and trim up the bottom, one, two, and three, and then the three lines in this wall join, one, two, three. Enter to say I'm done.
Zoom extents and control S to save. All right, excellent. In the next video, let's finish the master bedroom suite by working on our two closets here and here.
There's a small wall here for the master bedroom door, and then there's a storage closet up here, all connected to the same wall geometry. I'll see you in the next video.
