AboutBob Expertise I am good at getting Architects and Interior Designers who are intimidated by Autocad, ADT, etc. to feel comfortable, get things done.
PLEASE GIVE ME:
1- some background on you and your skills, and what field you are working in, so I can reply at your level and dont give architecture answers to an engineer
2- the reason you want to do what you are asking, so I will know I am helping you to get to a goal (maybe I have a better way to suggest)
3- the release of AutoCAD you are using
4- how much AutoCAD training you have taken
THAT WAY -- your question will be easy to answer more clearly. Thanks, BOB
Experience Interior Design and Space Planning. Autodesk U. 2000 and 2001.
Question QUESTION: I am trying to make a presentation board using autocad. My idea is to create a viewport in paper space and reference my floor plan. The size of the page is 20" x 30". I am doing this because I want to print out the 20"x30" and I want it to be to scale. I will also have some raster files in model space taht contain pics of furniture, finishes, et. I will reference these rastor files via a viewport on the layout as well. My question is: how do I put a shadowed border around the viewport to make it look nice and neet for a presentation board?
ANSWER: WELL--
First of all, I guess you are a student, and I will assume you have a recent release of AutoCAD.
You could try drawing 2 rectangles, one to match the vp, one larger, and using gradient hatch, to make a frame..
BUT -- Were it I, I would use a slightly larger piece of darker paper, and mount my plotted pages to that, on top of the presentation board. As I see it, the BOARD is 20x30, the PAGE that you are plotting is somewhat smaller.
BE CAREFUL -- you are using "reference" in a confusing way -- you mean you will show the raster files and the plan via viewports. I dont think you mean you are going to XREF in other files, as this all sounds small enough to be one file.
Good luck -- and my own school experience tells me that making the presentation boards takes more time than I plan, so I have to be careful to get the project completed, not just the boards.
BOB
---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------
QUESTION: Thank you for your reply... some follow up info/questions:
I did try the rectangle thing you suggested above and did use a gradiant hatch to give it the 'shadow' appearance, though when I tried to overlap a couple of the samples, ie, one veiwport was a chair, the other was a fabric, then I couldn't get the rectangle that I had created around the chair for overlapping to go away or be hidden behind the one that was overlapping it. I initially thought I could do this with the recangle method, but then tried toying with the properties of the viewport, and I was trying to find a way to make the vp boundary itself a thick black line but I couldn't figure out how to tweek the vp properties to get it to reflect a heavy black line.
I have done this in power point, but... even on a printed power point page it is difficult to get the refereced picture in powerpoint to be to scale, so I wanted to do it in autocad... since all my stuff is already there....
Any thoughts?
Answer OK -- you mean you want several vps, each with the shadow thing.
BE CAREFUL -- you are doint stuff you dont know, and havent been taught. It can take forever to figure some stuff out.
I am concerned that you--
1-- didnt realize that since you could not mess with the vp itself (which should be on a non-plot layer anyhow), you didnt simply draw rectangles with whatever width over them (note-- a rectagle is a polyline, so you change width.
2-- didnt simply TRIM off the overlap of the rectangles
You are better to create all this in Model Space, by scaling the images, overlapping,etc, and use a larger viewport. You will be there for eternity trying to figure it out otherwise.
You didnt mention viewport clipping or irregular viewports, which might help, but for all I know you may be using AutoCAD LT, which does not have them.
Kindly -- when asking for help, be professional, so the person has a context in which to know how to help --- "I am a X yr student in ABC, I have X experience with Acad, I have X time to get this done -- and so on" Your lack of acknowledging what it says in my profile, and some of your experimenting, make me wonder if you understand the importance of "everybody following the way it is normally done"
---- knowing how to relate is MORE important than being talented.
