Introduction to AutoCAD for Architectural Design: A Comprehensive Guide

Hello and welcome to the introduction to AutoCAD course presented by VDCI Virtual Design and Construction Institute. In this course, we will start at the very beginning, working through tools, workflows, and projects to introduce AutoCAD from an architectural perspective. AutoCAD is a very versatile tool and can be used in multiple disciplines, including mechanical, architectural, landscape, and many other design and construction fields.

We focus this course in the architectural discipline, but please know that the tools and workflows we cover in this course could be applied to many other disciplines. So let's get started. In this Get Started section, you can see that there is a helpful section with open and template files.

We will not use the Get Started or recent documents section of this screen. Instead, I would like to explore the user interface in a new drawing. So for now, please go to the New Drawing button in the top left corner of the screen, click new, and you will see that AutoCAD asks us to select a template.

I will choose AutoCAD, which is spelled A-C-A-D, ACAD.dwt for now, and I will hit open. This opens the template in our drawing. Here we can explore the rest of our user interface.

To begin, if we go back to the top-left corner of the screen, we can see an AutoCAD A, and if I click it, this is the application button menu. This menu has a lot of the menu bar options built into it, including new, open, save, etc. Also, it will show recent documents, and in a minute, we will go and check out the options window.

For now, I will click outside to close the application window, and you can see at the top that there are some menu bar icons, which can be further customized with this drop-down, and there are the top-level menu items in the menu bar, including File, Edit, View, Insert, etc. You can click on any of these to see a list of tools and commands, and these can be found in other places, including the ribbon. The ribbon is this large section below the menu bar, and the ribbon is distinctly built of three parts.

There are tabs, panels, and tools, and in AutoCAD, tools can also be known as commands. Right now, we are on the Home tab, which is identified here. In the Home tab, there is the Draw panel, the Modify panel, the Annotation panel, and more panels.

The ribbon can be customized by changing the panels that are visible. You can change the panels by coming over to any gray space to the side of active panels, right-clicking, and selecting Show Tabs or Show Panels. For now, we do not need to customize the ribbon.

Just know that we will spend most of our time in the Home, Insert, and Annotate tabs. I will go back to the Home tab, and let's explore this part of the window. This is what some people call the drawing area or the editor window.

This is where we draw, edit, and create all of our AutoCAD geometry. In the top-left corner, you will see a descriptor of the view. In this case, we are in a top-down view and in 2D wireframe.

That means that we won't see solid objects, but we will only draw 2D lines, arcs, and circles in this course. In the top-right corner, you will see the view cube. Again, in this course, we focus on a 2D environment, so we will not be utilizing the view cube, but just check to make sure that your view cube says top.

If it does, that means you are looking at the model from the top down. On the right, there is a nav bar. Again, very helpful when working in 3D and 2D, but in this case, we will use the three-button mouse and keyboard shortcuts to navigate through our model.

In the bottom-left corner, there is the UCS icon, and I'll drag my screen to make it a little bit more obvious. This UCS icon represents the origin 0,0,0 and it shows our cardinal directions. The X direction follows this red line, and that goes left to right and it goes positive to the right.

And the green line, the Y direction, goes up and down and positive to the top of the screen. This is a coordinate system, and we will talk about this much more when we begin drawing. At the bottom of the screen, you will see our tabs, and these include model space and paper space tabs to switch back and forth between our drawing area, which is a limitless area, and paper areas, which represent real-world sheets of paper.

These can be printed as PDFs or to real-world paper, and most of the time, we will model directly in model space. You can see that represented over here by the word model when we are in model space, and I'll click on Layout 1, and now it changes to paper. Now we are in paper space.

I will go back to model space. The status bar is located at the bottom-right of the screen, and to see all of the objects on the status bar, you will need to go to the very bottom right and click on these three horizontal lines, sometimes called a hamburger, and you can see many status bar options. These toggle the visibility of these options only.

You will need to open separate dialog boxes or pop-up windows to turn these on or off. In this case, I will turn on coordinates, dynamic input, and units because I would like to talk about these in more detail. First, let's look at our coordinates.

We can see the coordinate ticker down here, and it will update when we move our cursor around the screen. When I move the cursor closer to the XY gizmo, I can see those numbers approaching 0,0, 0. I mentioned this earlier. This represents the center of our coordinate system.

0 in the X direction, 0 in the Y direction, and 0 in the Z direction, which is the third number. Again, we will not be using three-dimensional geometry in this course, so that number should always be zero. As I move to the right and up, we see the X number increasing and the Y number increasing.

This is our positive quadrant, and we will model almost all of our geometry in the positive quadrant as we move forward. We will talk much more about coordinates and drawing using absolute coordinates and relative coordinates later in this course. Next, let's look at the units which have popped up here.

I'll click the fly-out, and we can see that AutoCAD identifies five unit styles. This is Architectural, Decimal, Engineering, Fractional, and Scientific. These are used in different disciplines, including architectural and engineering disciplines, and it will depend on the project you are working on.

For this course, we will always use the architectural unit style. This will be applied with our template, so we do not need to change this right now. Now, before we examine dynamic input, I want to examine the command prompt bar, and that is this object at the bottom of the screen.

AutoCAD is a text-based, text-driven software. That is, when we type, our keystrokes are recorded in the command bar. This is one way to activate commands, and it also shows our command prompts, which are suggestions and options in our tools.

If I wanted to activate the line command, for example, I could type 'line' on my keyboard. It will show me options that include the word line, including Line, and I can click an option to activate a tool, and I will hit escape to cancel. I'll type 'line' in again and this time I will hit ENTER.

Enter locks in what we are typing on the command prompt bar. Now, I can begin using the tool. At any time, I can click this up arrow to see my recent commands.

In this case, I have only activated the line tool twice and zoomed around the screen. This is a great log and a great history of what you've done in your project. For this course, I do not want the command prompt bar to be floating.

This is a newer design in new versions of AutoCAD. In this case, I will grab the five dots, click and hold, and I will move this bar around my screen until I see this rectangle appear at the bottom. When I see that, I will release and this will dock the command prompt into the bottom of the screen.

This is showing me eight lines of text. I think that's a little too many, so I will come to the top of the command bar and drag down until I see only about five lines. Now, when I type into my command prompt, I can see not only my active prompt but also my five most recent commands.

At any time while working, you can hit the Escape key to exit your current command. One Escape key will cancel once, and you may see me canceling multiple times as I work through workflows. Now we can review dynamic input.

Dynamic input is this toggle here, which is represented by a plus and a small black bar. When I click this button to turn on dynamic input, we can see that when I begin to type, the command prompt has been moved to a floating object next to the cursor. Dynamic input also modifies the way that input is received by different tools, and it is harder to track in a learning environment.

So for this course, we will work with dynamic input off, so that at all times, our typed commands and command prompts will be located in the bottom-left corner of the screen. So I will go back and toggle dynamic input off by clicking on this button. Dynamic input can also be activated or deactivated by pressing F12 on the keyboard.

If at any point you begin typing a command or coordinates and you see a box appear next to your crosshairs, please hit Escape and F12 to deactivate dynamic input. Then I will see it appear in the command prompt once again.