Learn how to effectively add multiple elements to your design with fewer steps in AutoCAD. This article provides a detailed guide on how to utilize the array command to expedite your design process.
Key Insights
- The array command in AutoCAD allows for a simplified process when adding multiple identical elements, like parking stalls, to a design. This command lets you specify the number of elements you want to replicate, reducing the need for manual placement.
- While initially, these elements are grouped together, AutoCAD provides an option to ungroup them. This additional step ensures each element can be individually adjusted if needed in the future.
- The array command, however, does not allow for retrospective changes to the number of elements. Therefore, careful planning and accurate counting of the required elements are necessary before initiating the array command.
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Now we're going to go ahead and add the rest of these stalls in and you may be thinking there has got to be a better way to do this right because you know we are adding quite a bit of different individual elements and there is a better way and so I'm going to show you from this perspective here and these look like they're nine foot stalls and so I could take my nine foot type here and I could place one and then I'm going to mirror it to place this next one here because that one's kind of unique and what I could do is I can use my array command and so if I were to select this parking stall here I could go to array and then I can tell it to go to the second one so if I want it to array from say this point which is my center line which is very important make sure you hit that center line to the next line from AutoCAD of our parking stall then what I could do is I could tell it to array a specific number so this is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 so if I set that to 11 then it'll drop in 11 stalls and then we're all set the one thing it does do that I'm not a big fan of and I'll show you why we leave it that way in the settings but we end up with a group here and that doesn't help us anyway here except for the fact that if I wanted to adjust it after the fact I can go in and I can say oh wait it was actually 12 or oh you know what it was actually 15 or something like that and in this case because it was 11 and we counted it ahead of time we're okay but what I would do is I would always go back after the fact here and I'm gonna go ahead and I want to make sure that these are ungrouped and so when you select it you can go ahead and you can say ungroup on these and it's a little it's a little odd because of the way that they're set up but if I get them all selected here and where it says just model groups then I can go in and I can actually tell it to ungroup all of those and so if I were to do this in a way where I planned it out like I did just now but said okay I have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 spaces that need to go in here then I could take this one I can add it in and it's flipped the wrong way so I'll turn it and move it to the right spot here and when I do my array knowing that I believe was 12 1 2 3 knowing that it's 12 I can do my array doing the same thing where I go to second so I'm gonna say second and then I can set that number to 12 here but I want to uncheck this group and associate and then it won't do the model group thing but the difference is that after I do the array that's it there's no going back and making changes to the number I'd have to do it all manually which really isn't that bad because it's still probably better than placing each one of the spots individually
