The AutoCAD Cheat Sheet

The AutoCAD Cheat Sheet is a list of what I consider to be the most useful command aliases for doing generic drafting in AutoCAD. If you don’t know, the command aliases are AutoCAD command keyboard shortcuts.

I went through the acad.pgp file to create this cheat sheet. The acad.pgp file is the program parameters file. It contains the external command and command alias definitions. To find out more about the acad.pgp file, go to your AutoCAD Help. (Tip: The F1 key is the keyboard shortcut for launching AutoCAD Help. )
 

Click the cheat sheet to see it in full size. Right click on the cheat sheet, and then select “save image as” for saving it to your computer.

It’s Free!!

The AutoCAD Cheat Sheet is free, so use it as you please!

Your Feedback

Aside from aiming to include the most useful AutoCAD keyboard shortcuts, I also tried to make the sheet readable at an arm’s length, in black and white printed format. I’d love to hear what you think of the sheet, so please feel free to share your thoughts via the comments below.

Conclusion

Be efficient by working smarter. I hope this sheet is a means to that end! Happy cadding!!

The Costs of an Employee

In addition to the base salary of full time CAD employee, there may also be the costs of: social security, disability, health care, time off, 401k and bonuses. Now these same costs may or may not be incorporated into the rate of a CAD drafting service, but even if they are, they would only be paid on an as-needed basis, and not 40 hours a week for each of the 52 weeks in a year. Being able to use a CAD drafting service only when needed is where the savings could come in. Making this determination would of course have to be done on a case by case basis, but generally speaking, if by sending CAD out-of-house an AEC Industry company can get its CAD work completed, on schedule, in accordance with its CAD standards, and at a cost less than maintaining an in-house year round CAD employee, then doing so may be prudent.

Mutually Beneficial Arrangements

There is also an arrangement that can be made with a CAD provider, that gives a middle ground feeling between that of an employee and an external service. That arrangement would be to put a CAD drafting service on retainer for “x” number of days per week (or months, etc.). CAD drafting service companies often work as many companies do, by queuing up projects when they come in. Through a retainer arrangement, an AEC Industry company which is in need of drafting services could make sure that they are regularly listed the queue of one, even during the times when the CAD drafting service is busy. In running my CAD drafting service I’ve done this with a client of mine during a time when they wanted to make certain I would be available to them no matter what. The way it worked was that they prepaid for two days per week of my time, and I booked those days in my schedule for them. There were no refunds on the booked time, so I knew that I was getting paid for the time whether they submitted CAD drafting tasks or not, and they knew that my services would be available to them for two days per week.

Conclusion

If a company can save money during tight economic times through outsourcing CAD drafting work to a provider that can get the work done when and how the company wants it, then doing so may be prudent.

I started working in the AEC industry in the late nineties, and it probably wasn’t long after that when I first heard the phrase shop drawings. I’m sure that at the time the phrase conjured up pictures in my imagination as I thought about its meaning. Now a decade later I’m able to define the phrase, and will do so herein this article.

Considering Different Definitions

Let me do some online and offline referencing to see how others have defined the phrase shop drawings.

Starting on my bookshelf I found that The Means Illustrated Construction Dictionary Third Edition Unabridged defined shop drawings as

Drawings created by a contractor, subcontractor, vendor, manufacturer, or other entity that illustrate construction, materials, dimensions, installation, and other pertinent information for the incorporation of an element or item into the construction.

Moving onto the web I found the online AIA Document Commentary, A201-2007 General Conditions of the Contract for Construction document stated in section 3.12.1

Shop Drawings are drawings, diagrams, schedules and other data specially prepared for the Work by the Contractor or a Subcontractor, Sub-subcontractor, manufacturer, supplier or distributor to illustrate some portion of the Work.

Lastly, I turned up a definition from Wikipedia. They cited R Pietroforte (1997)(PDF), Construction Management & Economics, Taylor & Francis Retrieved 2007-02-23, which gave a definition of

A shop drawing is a drawing or set of drawings produced by the contractor, supplier, manufacturer, subcontractor, or fabricator.

Curating the Definitions

These three definitions provide a mini sample set of definitions, so that I can check for consistency amongst them, and compare them to my life’s experience within the AEC Industry.

Based on my experience I’d say that these definitions do an excellent job of defining what shop drawings are. There is nothing more I need to add to them.

Concluding With A Practical Example

On a practical level, let me give a hypothetical example to flesh out this definiton.

Let’s say that there is a man who wants a 20 story building constructed, and so he hires an Architecture / Engineering firm to put together the construction documents for doing so. The finished construction documents will be taken in hand by a Contractor, so construction can happen.

However, the construction documents would not contain all the information and details that the Contractor would need in order for him to complete the construction of the building. This is where shop drawings would come in. They would act as the bridge that fills in the gap between the contract documents and the Contractor. The shop drawings would provide the additional information and details that the Contractor requires.

I first became aware of the image frame when I inserted a company logo image into an AutoCAD drawing. The reason that I noticed the border was because I didn’t want it to appear when I printed the file, but it did!!

If you too have found yourself with an unwanted image frame, then do not fret, because it’s easy to hide. If you type imageframe into the command line, and then hit enter, you will be left with a prompt in the command line.

The command line prompt.

The numbers in the prompt stand for the following:

0 = frame off
1 = frame on
2 = frame on in drawing, but off in plot

I would recommend using option 2.

Also, you can get to this command through the drop down menus, as follows: modify > object > image > frame

Access the imageframe command via the drop down menu.

That’s all there is to hiding your image frame! Happy cadding!!

The cloud is off-site and decentralized, so as not to rely on any one single computer. The off-site location is accessed through an internet connection.

There is however another context in which the word cloud is used. That other context is in point cloud data. Today I’ll discuss point cloud data. Sorry if you were looking for another cloud computing or cloud storage article!!

Getting the Idea of Point Cloud Data

I work in the Architectural and Structural niches of the AEC industry. Within this industry, often times projects revolve around rehabilitating existing buildings. It is common to require existing conditions drawings of a building that is slated for rehabilitation work.

Highly detailed existing conditions drawings can be created by means of 3D laser scanning. Creating such drawings by means of 3D laser scanning is a two-step process, and the first step of the process includes creating point cloud data.

As an example, imagine you wanted to rehab a extremely ornate facade of a high-rise building, and no old plans of the facade existed. Therefore you would have to create existing conditions drawings of the facade from scratch. Creating such drawings of the facade could be done by first performing an on-site 3D laser scan of the building facade, and then by secondly processing the scan data.

Therefore, if you were to perform a 3d laser scan of this facade, the laser scan would capture what is called point cloud data. This is the first step I mentioned above.

After the point cloud data has been collected by means of the scan, the data would next need to be processed. The data processing is when the point cloud data is turned into vector format CAD drawings. This is the second step I mentioned above.

The concept of point cloud data processing is simple. It’s just a matter of connecting the individual data points. Doing so requires software to handle the many many data points.

A Resource

Autodesk, the maker of AutoCAD and other software, have had an interest in point cloud data Feature Extraction and Shape Extraction. The Autodesk blog post titled “Point Cloud Feature Extraction for Revit is what you should try” is a good resource to learn more about point cloud data. If you work in the AEC industry and would like to learn more about point cloud data, then I recommend checking this Autodesk post out.

Conclusion

I hope this brief example and resource serve as a good introduction to point cloud data, if this is a new topic to you!!