By Renu Muthoo. In AutoCAD 2018.1, a few significant improvements have been made to working with views and viewports in the layouts. The layout viewports can now be created from named views and also directly from the layout itself if a named view of a desired area is not available.
- [Instructor] Welcome to another AutoCADtip and trick to use.Now you'll notice we've got a new drawing for you.It's called Decking & Garden.dwg.You can download that from the website,as usual, to follow along with the video.Now what we're going to look at is some deckingand some gardens and some landscaping;and I'm actually working on a personal project at the momenton my rear garden, and this is my CAD drawingof what we're going to be planning and working on.Now I'm not actually going to do any changes to the drawing,per se; but what I'm going to show you is a lovelynew feature available in the AutoCAD 2018.1 update.
Now you get these updates because obviously the modelfor AutoCAD now is subscription-based,and the .1 update comes out with new featuresand enhancements to AutoCAD.Now, we're going to have a lookat this wonderful new panel in the ribbon.Go to the View tab on your ribbon;and once you've installed the update,you can see that you've got a new Named Views panel.Now I absolutely love this.This makes my life so much easier because I quite oftenuse named views in my AutoCAD drawings.
So if I go up here now to the list, if I click here,you'll see that we've got some preset views.So if I click on decking, I've created a Named View,I can go straight to it like that.If I want to go to my Garage 1 view,it takes me over to the garage there.If I want to go to my rear gate view,there's the rear gate there.Now, the lovely thing is is if I want to create a new view,I can easily just jump in here, select my top view like so,and I might want to show the patio doors here, for example.
So I'll go New View, and I'll call the view Patio Doors,like so; and we'll say that that's a plan view,so I'll click on the down arrow and select the Plan.I've already been creating plan viewspreviously for those other Named Views.So I now click on this icon, Define View Window,and click there, drag it around the patio doors like that,Enter to accept, click on Okay; job done.So now when I jump in here, you'll see I've now gotPatio Doors; and I can quickly zoom into the patio doorsand edit any details I may need to edit.
So I'll go back to the top view now,and just click on Top there in the list.Now what I love about this is I can go in there.I've got a View Manager, as well; I can jump in there.There's all my views.I can edit the properties of my viewsif I want to jump into the View Manager.I'll click on Cancel to close that.Now the other really lovely new feature involving viewsand viewports is a really nice viewports feature.So in your model space here, for example,I'm creating lots of new views and naming them;and I've got that lovely Named Views panel to use now.
Now if I jump into my ISO A1 landscape tab here,you can see I've got some nice viewports all set up,very simple title block there;and we've got the main view of the garden.So there's the red decking, there's the paving,there's the doors, the garage, the garage;and that orange line is the outline of the house.That's great and if I click onthat viewport and look at the status bar,you can see there that it's set to 1:50.Now that one I want to leave at 1:50.So I'm going to come down to the status bar,click on the lock symbol, and lock that one;and just hit Escape to deselect it.
Now what's really lovely about the other viewportsis I can quickly go in and edit these.So if I double-click in this viewport like so,you can see it's in the top view;so I might want, say, the rear gate view.So I can click there, I can go to Custom Model Views,and they're all in there courtesy ofmy Named Views Panel in the ribbon.So I might want the rear gate in that one.So that zooms in nicely like so.Now, you'll notice that it's not a standard scaledown at the bottom there on the status bar.
I'm now going to click in this viewport, and what I might dohere is perhaps go for the patio door view.So I'll click there and I'll go Custom Model Viewsand go Patio Doors like so.And, again, it's not a nice, simple standard scale.However, here's a really, really nice trick.If I just hit Escape now to deselect anythingand double-click outside any viewportso that they're not active.Now I've set those two views up in the viewport,so you can see the rear gate and the patio doors.
I'm going to select the rear gate viewport.Now as soon as I do that,if any of you have used dynamic blocks before,you'll recognize this little symbol here.Click, and I can go and pick a scalefor my viewport there and there.Now let's have a look down at the status bar,nought point nought seven.If you round that up to nought point one,that's going to give you a scale of 1:10 in metric.Now as soon as you do that, be careful.Now it's rounded it up to a lovely 1:10 scale,but it also in context resizesthe viewport to the named view.
So what I've done there is I've made my viewport biggerto fit my 1:10 scale, but it kind of clasheswith the border and all the other viewports.So I'm just going to hit Escape there and undo that one step.However, if I want a smaller scale,watch what happens if I go the other way.So if I said, say, 1:20, it actually resizes the viewportand makes it smaller to accommodatethe newly rescaled view in the viewport.Now that's great because what I can do now isI can now just right-click there, go to Moveon the shortcut menu, click on the corner,move it over to the corner; job done.
So that is beautiful.I've got a nice 1:20 view there of the rear gate.So I can do the same with the patio doors.If I select the viewport, let's set that to 1:20 as well,like so, resizes the viewportaccordingly to fit the named view.So, again, it's just a case of right-click, Move,one corner there, one corner there,hit Escape just to deselect anything, and you can see therethat those scale views are all fitting in nicelyinto my little, sort of, very simplistic title block.
So bear in mind that these features are newto the AutoCAD 2018.1 update.