Use AutoCAD's dynamic block feature to streamline your design process. Learn how to add insulation to your project with just a few simple steps, eliminating tedious line-by-line drawing.
Key Insights
- The dynamic block feature in AutoCAD is a useful tool that can simplify the design process, allowing you to add specific elements, such as insulation, with ease rather than having to draw each line manually.
- Dynamic blocks are scalable and can be adjusted to any size or scale as per project requirements. This characteristic allows for a high degree of flexibility in your designs.
- Dynamic blocks are also stretchable and repeatable. Upon clicking the block and dragging the arrow, it will repeat the insulation pattern until the desired endpoint is reached, creating a seamless design feature.
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 in our insulation. And let's think about that a moment. We could simply draw in a series of circle arcs and lines and draw the insulation.
But that would be tedious. So AutoCAD has a pretty cool tool that's called a Dynamic Block. And we'll use one now.
There's one already loaded into the project. And you can use it for your projects going forward. And let's go to Insert.
And here it is. Already loaded this bat insulation. It's at the top of our list.
And I'm going to drag it in. There's just one issue with this block. It's really tiny.
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So drag and drop it in and let go. And you might even have a hard time seeing it on your screen. So I want to emphasize how tiny this is.
It's super small. But there it is. It's only a sixteenth of an inch tall.
But it's scalable. It's very small. We can make it any scale we want.
How do we do that? Let's scale it up. We'll type in a line. Line command.
And I'm going to click on the left corner. Actually, let's do the right corner here. Right corner, click.
And I want to go to the left here and line it up with the center point. Did you notice how I did that? I just moved my cursor over and kind of find that middle point and pull it down. I get this green line.
Take a little bit of practice to get that to happen. I also need to make sure down at the bottom that I have my snapping reference lines on or F11 on my keyboard. So hover there and then go straight down to get that green line.
Click. That is the center line. And then from there, I'm going to draw a line.
And I'm going to go to the top right here to the midpoint and click. There it is. That's one line.
And now I need to draw my reference line. I'll click line again. L-I-N-E.
A little bit easier this time. I'll click right here at the bottom. Go straight up and zoom out significantly.
And I'll type in six inches. Enter. And escape.
And if I zoom out even further, I'll see just how tiny that little installation line is. I can't even really see it. I'm going to go ahead and close my blocks.
And we'll zoom back in. And we'll do a special kind of scale. So let's select that entire block and the lines we drew.
Type in S-C for scale. And enter. Specify the base point.
And it says type in a scale factor. You can move your mouse. Or you can press the down arrow.
Press the down arrow. And we want to do what's called a reference. So select reference or click R on your keyboard for reference.
Enter. Then we'll specify the reference height. That is the short height or where we started from.
So click the bottom of the line right here to the tippy top. Click. And now when we move our mouse or our cursor up, we'll zoom out.
Keep moving up until we find the top of the line. We find it. We click.
And that's it. Magically our installation is now six inches tall. Now if you're lost with that, that's okay.
What you could do is just copy down one of these installations that is already set up at six inches. Just copy it and you can use it. But I wanted to show that process.
I know it can be confusing though. If we've got to this point, let's click on R-O. R-O command to rotate.
Click on this point right there. Click and move our cursor straight up. Click again.
And now it's oriented properly. We'll select it. M for move.
Grab that corner and place it right there. So that's a lot of work just to get one little loopy shape here. But the dynamic blocks are stretchable.
They repeat. So I'll click it and then I have this blue arrow. I'll drag it straight up and watch how cool that is.
It repeats the installation all the way until I get to the end here. And I can click again. And there it is.
I've got that installation drawn. Pretty cool, right? And again, if that didn't work out, grab this one above. C-O to copy.
Grab that base point right there. Click. Bring it down into place.
Click. Hit escape. And you're good to go that way too.
But I wanted to show the whole thing. Let's look at it one other way. I'm going to select it and type in B-Edit.
That's block edit. And just click OK. And there it is.
It's a special block. We're in the block editor right now. We're not going to make any changes.
But just so you can see how this works, there is a distance and a stretch arrow. And as you drag that stretch arrow in our project, it repeats this pattern. So you can start to think of all the cool patterns you can make with this type of dynamic block.
But let's just close it. And we'll discard the changes. And we're just right back to where we were.
