Setting Up Wall Layouts and Layer Management for Complex Rectilinear Floor Plans in AutoCAD

In this video, we are going to begin to lay out our walls for our floor plan. Let's quickly take a look at our layers dropdown and see what we have here.

You'll notice that a lot of the layers are going to be the same as we had in our previous course. We have a wall, we have a counter, a glaze, a fixture. We also have dimensions layers, but these now have Anno, A-N-N-O, included in them.

And this is so that we can group the dims and the sims layers next to each other. You might also see A-N-O text in some projects in your office, but here we only have A-N-O dims and sims. You'll also notice that there are some numbers and those represent the anticipated plot scale of different drawing scales.

We know 48 is our quarter inch equals a foot anticipated plot scale factor. 24 and 12 are a half inch and one inch, and 96 is one eighth of an inch. As we go through this course, we will have different drawings at these scales.

Our floor plan will be quarter inch, our roof plan will be eighth of an inch, and we will have detail plan views at one inch and half inch scales. We'll also have symbols on some of those plans as well. You'll notice that we also have roof layers and we will create layer states for our plan and roof models when we get to that point.

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For now, let's select a wall and make it our current layer. If you take a look at your handout, you'll notice that we have an irregularly shaped floor plan. This is far more common than having a perfectly rectangular floor plan like we had in our first two courses.

But no matter what, this is still a rectilinear plan. There's no angled walls, and we have a total bounding box size. We can see that dimension along the bottom is 60 feet and 7 inches wide, and on the left side, we see 59 feet 7 inches high.

If you look at the top and the right, there are also dimension strings there, but those dimension strings do not go the total width and height of the building. Those are only partial strings. When you're reviewing a floor plan, make sure that you can see the total dimension string and choose the correct side to pull your dimension.

So this is 60 feet 7 in the X and 59 feet 7 in the Y. So let's start by creating a rectangle bounding box with those dimensions. I'll go rectangle. My first point will be 0,0.

Enter. My dimensions are going to be D, enter for dimensions, and this is 60 feet, again that's the tick mark, and 7, enter. And then our height is 59 feet, that's the tick mark, and 7, enter.

I'm going to click the positive quadrant, and you can see that I'm in positive. When I stop moving my mouse, you'll see a polar snap showing where 0,0 is. So I'll click positive, and if I start my quick measure and put my cursor in the middle, we can see 60 feet 7 wide and 59 feet 7 in the vertical direction.

Excellent. I'll hit escape, escape, escape, and control S to save. Now we are going to create some wall cutouts, but before we do that, we need to explode our rectangle.

We need to make these offsets individually from each side. I'll go to my explode tool. I'll pick my rectangle and hit ENTER.

Explode has the keyboard shortcut of X if you'd like to practice your keyboard shortcuts. Looking at the floor plan, we can see that the bottom right corner has no cutouts. The garage is touching both this line and this line, so no edits need to be made on our bounding box in this corner.

If we look at this corner, we can see that there is a shape that goes down, then over, then down, then over. It's creating kind of a 7 shape in the negative space, so that's going to be kind of complicated. In the bottom left, we see it goes over, down, over, up, over, down.

That's even more complicated. Let's do that one last, but in the top left, we see that there's just a simple rectangular cutout. We can see that it's 7 feet from left to right and 11 feet 5 from this top line down.

So let's do that offset and fillet. I'll go offset, 7 feet, enter. I'll click this line, go to the left and click, enter to say that I'm done, enter to go back in, 11 feet 9, enter.

From this top line, down and click, enter to say that I'm done, and now we want to fillet these. Again, we're focusing here. I'm going to start on a line I know, and that's the outer line, and I'm going to turn the corner with my fillets, tracing the outline of the building.

I'm going to go to fillet. The first thing I need to do is check my radius, R, enter. I'll make sure it is 0,0, enter, and here I'm going to do multiple fillets, so I'll do M, enter for multiple.

Now I'm going to start on the left side here. This is the piece of the wall I want to keep, so I'll click on what I want to keep, turn the corner, and click here. Now we're on this line.

I'll click to start, turn the corner up, and I'll click here. Now up at the top, start here, and then turn the corner and click here. Perfect.

Enter to say that I'm done, and we have cut the corner on the first side of our building successfully. All right. Remember, the bottom right doesn't need any modification.

The garage goes all the way down. In the next video, we'll do this top right corner and the bottom left. See you there.