This article provides a step-by-step guide on setting up a viewport in a drawing software, detailing the process of drawing, scaling, and rotating the viewport to fit the alignment, and ensuring the labels are the correct height in the paper space. The author also discusses how to change the coordinate system inside the model space and create a window in the model space.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to set up a viewport inside the paper space, starting from drawing a rectangle and adjusting its scale to fit the desired drawing scale in the paper space.
- The author describes how to adjust the viewport's alignment by moving and rotating it, ensuring it fits most of the lots from the main development, and adjusting the drawing scale if necessary.
- Additionally, the article outlines the process of changing the coordinate system inside the model space, setting up a new UCS, and creating a window in the model space, ensuring the labels auto-update and are the correct height in the paper space.
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I'm going to go ahead and set up my viewport now inside of my paper space. I'm going to draw a rectangle.
I'm going to start at this corner here, and I'm going to come down to the intersection of these two vertical lines. So I'm going to go shift, right click, apparent intersection of this line and this line. I'm going to take that rectangle I just created.
I'm going to offset it in one. I'm going to go ahead and delete out that first rectangle I created, and then I'm going to take this viewport and scale it up to the window that I just created. I'm going to grab that window that I just created.
I'm going to right click, clipboard, copy with base point, and I'm going to go ahead and pick the bottom left corner of that window. I'm going to go back into my model space, and I'm going to go ahead and do a control V. I'm going to place that box, which is my viewport window, and I'm going to scale it up appropriately to the scale of the drawing scale that I want in my paper space. So I want to do a 20 scale drawing, so I'm going to scale this up by 20.
So from here, I now have an indicator of what my viewport is going to look like. I'm going to go ahead and move this into my drawing space, and then I'm going to rotate it to fit my alignment. So I'm going to go ahead and rotate it and pick here.
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I'm going to move it up so that I'm fitting most of my lots from my dev main in. I'm going to turn off my snaps so that I can pick a better location, and then I'm going to select. Now, 20 scale might not be the best for this drawing.
I may want to go up to 40, but for our purposes here, 20 is going to be fine. We'll get to see what this looks like in paper space now that we have this window here. I'm going to go ahead and go to layout.
I'm going to jump into my window by double clicking. So jumping into model space by double clicking on my viewport, I'm going to go ahead and navigate over like this. I'm going to change my coordinate system inside of my model space of my paper drawing.
I'm going to go ahead and do new UCS. I am going to turn on my snaps, and I'm going to snap to this bottom left corner. I'm going to go ahead and set my first coordinate, my X axis as the bottom edge of this window, and I'm going to set my XY plane as the top edge of that window.
Now that I've done that, I'm going to type plan. I'm going to type C for current, and then I'm going to zoom in closer to this box. I'm going to go ahead and do a view, zoom.
I'm going to go to window. I'm going to go ahead and shift, right click, and select endpoint. Shift, right click, and select endpoint to the other opposite corner, and Civil 3D will have created a window on the box that I have inside of model space.
So I'm going to go ahead and click into model space so that we can see what that looks like. In fact, it does fit this window here. I'm going to jump back out to layout tab.
Now my labels should have auto updated themselves. If I zoom in here, we're going to see that the labels are in fact the correct height to be 0.1 inches high in my paper space. So I'm going to go ahead and zoom extents.
I'm going to save this drawing, and then I'll meet you in the next video.
