Discover the process of refining M-Leaders in your drawings, ensuring consistency and accuracy in your work. Learn how to modify M-Leaders, maintain consistent angles, and avoid random leader angles that can make your drawings appear sloppy.
Key Insights
- The article outlines the importance of maintaining a consistent angle for M-Leaders (30 degrees off vertical) to ensure the overall neatness and professionalism of a drawing.
- It provides a step-by-step guide on modifying M-Leaders, including renaming, changing formats, and adjusting scale factors. It also covers how to draw additional lines at the end of leaders for future terminations.
- The article emphasizes the importance of careful layer adjustments and saving changes frequently during the drawing process.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Pretty much one of the last things we need to do is to focus on our M-Leaders. We've just gone into the M-Leader command and we've made some modifications.
We renamed the M-Leader to be M-Leader 04. We took it from being a splined format to a straight format. Leader structure, we have our scale factor of 4. I'm just going to choose cancel because we've gotten it all done and I'm going to do close.
And if you look at the drawings right here, you can notice that the leaders that are in place have a consistent angle. And the angle consistency is 30 degrees off of vertical. And so that's a norm that I've been trained to use and I'm going to ask you to do the same.
Because if you have your leader angles coming in arbitrarily, the drawing looks sloppy. And so most offices do have a standard that leaders will come in at a particular angle. So I'm going to go to home layer and I'm going to go in and make a text my current layer.
I'm going to zoom into here and I can see that this text points to this existing door that's right here. So I'm going to delete and I'm going to go to annotate, M-Leader, M-Leader. I'm going to go to this point right here.
Learn AutoCAD
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
I'm going to go down and turn on my Polar Osnap. And you can see if I click at the angle right here that it's looking at being every 5 degrees. So I'm going to turn on Polar Osnap.
So what I want to do is to take my crosshairs where the horizontal position over here is bisecting the text. You can see that it says 90 degrees. I'm going to come over, read the dynamic input until it says 60.
And I'm going to take my crosshairs and make them bisect the text. I'm going to go straight over and then I'm going to pick. I'm now done.
I'm going to hit close the text editor. I can now take my leader. I've just selected it.
Pick on the grip over here and pull it back a bit. Pull it back a little bit more and this a little bit more to the right. And hit escape.
I'm now going to draw a line from the end of this leader straight down. Because what this line is going to let me do is that future leaders will terminate at the end of this line. I'd like to now do the next set of M leaders.
I'm going to erase these out, remembering that I'm pointing to the top and into the plywood. I'm going to go M leader. I want to point to the item.
So I'm going to say nearest. Choose on the entity. Again, I have the 90.
Take off my ortho. I have my Polar Osnap. I need to turn it and make sure it's back on because I turned it off at one point.
So I have 90. I want the angle to read 60. And I pick, making sure my horizontal crosshairs are bisecting the text.
It says where's the landing location. I'm going to say perpendicular to there. I'm going to close the editor.
Choose this. Take the grip. Pull it back.
Choose this grip here and say go perpendicular to that line. Control+S to save. I will go back to M leader.
Pick within the body. I have my running O snap on. Do you see that happening right there? Press F3 to take my running O snap off.
Engage it. Again, Polar Osnap is already on. I see that my angle is 60.
I'm going to say nearest NEA to the line. It did not accept it. Zoom in.
Polar Osnap is on. Make sure it says 60 degrees. And I will pick landing point intersection of here.
Hit escape. Choose the grip. Pick it to the left.
Pick this and say go to the intersection of here. Escape. The last one I want to do is to point to the flashing.
And again, this is the flashing. Now, one thing that's really interesting about details is do you notice all the space that's going on between the entities? We all know that when we actually build these things that they're all touching one another. But to easily identify them in the documentation process, we tend to pull them apart.
And it's an arbitrary distance that we pull them apart. But we tend to pull them apart so that we can better explain what we're going to be doing. So I'm going to save the drawing.
I'm going to erase the M leader. Go back to M leader. I'm going to say nearest to here.
I'm going to come down. You see it's saying 270. My angle wants to be 30 degrees off of vertical.
I'll go to 300. I pick. I'll say my end is perpendicular to here.
I close the text editor. Zoom in. Pick.
Pick on the grip. Ortho's on. Drag it to the left.
Choose the arrow and say perpendicular to that line. Escape. Erase our line.
Zoom extents. Control+S to save. Now what we have completed is we've brought our detail in from another library.
We've checked the layers. We've made layer modifications. In particular, we have changed the color of the layer for the title block and for the text.
We've gone into our multi-leader, and again, that came out of initially our template file. We took the multi-leader and renamed it from being M leader 48 to being M leader 04. We changed some parameters within the M leader itself.
One of the last things we want to do is go to the home tab, and we will just make zero our current layer. Control+S to save. I'm going to go up to file.
Drawing utilities. Purge. I'm just now going to say purge all.
Close. Control+S and save the file. Now one thing we can do if we'd like is we can type in line type scale, LTS, and you can see it says a scale factor of 1. I'm going to make it a 4 just in the event the other detail had line types beyond that in a continuous line type.
Something I can do too if I'd like is I can say stretch crossing, and I can just pull with ortho on F8. I can just pull these lines up. Escape.
Control+S to save just to give my graphic a little bit more expression. If you really want to, I can go stretch crossing from the end of here and go perpendicular to my boundary right there. Again, Control+S to save.
Zoom extents and save the file. If you would, please get your drawing to this point, and congratulations on our first detail.
