Explore the powerful features of AutoCAD, an essential tool for interior designers, in creating a professional floor plan. This content guides you through the process of setting up your cover sheet, manipulating title blocks, and adjusting sheet elements for your project.
Key Insights
- The 'Save As' feature in AutoCAD is highlighted as an important tool in interior design, allowing for the creation of a copy of the original floor plan thereby ensuring the original design remains intact for reference.
- The content discusses the role of 'plot' command in setting up the size of the drawing set, and the use of 'attribute editor' for modifications in the title block including the 'drawn by' category and the sheet name.
- Details about managing a project map, inserting new rows, and adjusting the sheet index are also provided to help generate a comprehensive and professional floor plan.
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.
By using the Save As feature in AutoCAD, what we have done is essentially create a copy of our original floor plan drawing file. And that's a good workflow as an interior designer. We want to leave that original floor plan alone.
It's there for our reference and we don't want to mix anything up in that original floor plan. We want to continue our work in that copy. So let's keep going.
Our first line of business is to create our first cover sheet for our drawing set. Lucky for us, we already have a cover sheet in our project. Down at the bottom left, we'll notice that we have a model tab.
That is the model where we are currently working. We draw our lines and create our floor plan changes. The next tab over is our first sheet.
So go ahead and click on that. It's I for interiors dash zero. And here it is.
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It's not complete, but it's a start. Let's take a look at what's going on in this sheet and get to know some of the details. First, type in the word plot and click enter.
Now, if you're in a newer version of AutoCAD, you might see a warning explaining that we could publish all of our drawing sheets, but we want to continue to plot a single sheet. We're not actually going to plot anything. We just want to get to know what's going on in our sheet.
We'll notice that our size is already set up for us as 24 inches wide by 18 inches tall. Our scale of our drawing is one to one. When we go to create our final set, it's going to be an 18 × 24 inch set.
Now you notice there are other sizes here. Every project has different requirements, but for our purposes, we're going to stick with the 24 × 18 landscape project. Now there's no changes to make here.
We just wanted to see what's going on. Let's go ahead and click that cancel button to make no changes. Beyond that, we have a title block.
It's simply a block. We'll click on it once. There's a block and it has attributes.
What are attributes? Those are data points to a block that can be changed. In this case, one of those datasets is the drawn by category. We want to put our first and last name there.
We can double click on any of the lines in our title block. Just double click and that brings up the attribute editor. We want the drawn by prompt.
Right now it's FL for first name last name. Go ahead and change that to your initials. Your first initial and your last initial and then click okay.
You'll notice that update to your first and last name. We also want to update the title of our cover sheet. Let's double click that block again.
Just double click and that brings up the attribute editor again. If we scroll down, we're looking for the name of the sheet. It's called currently cover sheet.
We want to make that simply two words. Cover space and then a big S for sheet. Cover sheet and click okay.
That's all we need to do to set up our title block. That looks pretty good. We'll notice that we have some project information.
We see the project is located in Pennsylvania. There are our owner's names and we have an interior designer. That's you.
Just double click in this text box and that will let you make some edits. You're going to want to put your first and last name as the interior designer. Then you'll notice the applicable code for our building is the International Residential Code 2024.
That's fine. Just click out of that box and make sure it says interior designer your name. Then we have a project map.
That's pretty typical. It just helps the plan reviewers, the contractors, everyone understand very clearly where this project is located. Then we have a sheet index and we want to populate this.
Now we have in our course a whole document full of sheet notes. I'll scroll through it really quickly so you can see what's here. It has, for example, first a sheet list and then some project specifications.
It'll have other notes we'll use on other pages. This will be an important document for this class. The first little portion we need is our sheet list.
It's actually for I0 and we'll notice that it has I0 cover sheet, I1 demolition plans, and so on. Let's go ahead and get our first sheet to match that sheet list. We click right here and we can click over to the cover sheet.
If we click in this cell and double click, we can make edits. We want to put a space and give it a capital S for cover sheet. Then the I1 is going to change.
We want that to be our demolition plan. Again, we double click in that cell and type in demolition plans. With that, we can click out and click back to our third row.
Up at the top, we'll find a rows area with tools for rows. We're looking for insert below. We want to add a new row below the current row.
We'll click that several times. We want to have six sheets in our project, so we'll keep clicking that insert below several times. We'll count those rows 1,2, 3,4, 5, and 6. Now, it says seven here.
