From the course: AutoCAD: Tips & Tricks

328 ACCURACY - Working with 3D Object Snaps when modelling in AutoCAD - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD: Tips & Tricks

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

328 ACCURACY - Working with 3D Object Snaps when modelling in AutoCAD

“

- [Instructor] We're in another AutoCAD tip and trick, and we're going to be taking a look at 3D object snaps, or OSnaps as they're affectionately known. So we've got a drawing for you. It's called 328 3D OSnaps, and you can download it from the library as usual to follow with this particular tips and tricks video. Now we've got a simple 3D model in the model space here right now, albeit that we are looking at it from the top, we're in a top view. So at the moment you can see the view cube here is registering top. And if I go here on the view control, it's also registering top, and we've got the parallel setting in place. If I go to perspective, it all starts to look a bit weird with sloping edges and stuff. So what I'll do is I'll just make sure that's back to parallel again, like so. Now what we're going to look at are these 3D object snaps. Now if I want to draw something on this particular 3D solid let's say I wanted to draw a circle on top of the center of this face here. Now that's great, but the problem I have is if I draw a circle using this flat top view, it'll put the circle at the Z = 0 coordinate value. Let me show you what I mean. So I've got the layer sets of objects like so, and I'm going to go to the circle drop down and do center radius, and I'm going to come in here as you can see there's a center there, there's my center snap. So I click, I'll drag the circle out to say a radius of 30 and press enter. So there's my circle, but the problem is I can't tell where that is. Is it on top of the 3D solid? It's on the bottom of the 3D solid. The circle is actually set so that the Z value is zero. Now if I do a little bit of orbiting here, if I hold down the shift key, hold down the wheel on my mouse, I can orbit by moving the mouse around. So I just hold down the shift key, hold down the wheel, and as you can see when I orbit, can you see that circle is on the bottom? Can you see that of the solid there? It's on the bottom of this solid here. Now that's not where I want my circle to be. So I'm just going to quickly select both objects. Click, crossing selection, click, hold down shift, click on the solid, and just hit the delete key to delete the circle. Now what you can do is change the view that you're in. So I'm going to go to the view cube and click on that corner. So I'm now in a nice isometric view of my 3D solid. You'll notice I'm using the visual style x-ray at the moment as well. Kind of makes my 3D solid a little bit transparent which is quite useful. So we need some 3D object snaps to work more accurately with our 3D solid. So we go down to the customization icon, the three lines, and we can switch on 3D object snap there like so. Click on the drawing, customization menu closes. Now there's my 3D object snaps here. So I turn them on, click on the arrow, and there's the ones I can turn on and off. Now I'm going to leave Vertex midpoint on edge, and center of face ticked like so. I'll click away from the menu for that to disappear. Let's go back to that circle command now. Center radius, and now when I hover her, can you see I'm getting a 3D center? So if I click now and drag out, and do that 30 radius and press enter, can you see that circle is on the top face? I've used the center of the face 3D object snap. That would then allow me to do something like an extrude, and perhaps extrude that upwards to put like a little cylindrical solid on top. So if I type extrude and just press enter, and select the object to extrude, which will be my circle in this case, make sure I get the circle, press enter to confirm. And as I come upwards, you can see there, if I just give that a value of say 50, there's my little cylindrical solid on top, but you can see it's on top because I've used that center of face 3D object snap. What about the other 3D object snaps I've got going right now, let's have a look. I've got midpoint on edge and also vertex as well. Now again, it might be that your 3D modeling in your AutoCAD so you might want to change the workspace down here as well. Let's change that to 3D modeling too. So I've got all my 3D modeling tools here, like so, so we've still got those other 3D snaps, what were they? Now let's have a look. We've got midpoint on edge and vertex. Let's have a look at those. So a midpoint on an edge is literally as it says a midpoint on an edge, I'm going to zoom in a bit, and a midpoint on an edge. If I wanted to draw a line, let's say, I've still got the draw panel, there you go. Let's do a line and I come down to a midpoint on edge as my midpoint there like so. And as I come across, I can go to the other midpoint on edge like that. And that line, if I press enter is drawn on top. Can you see it's gone to the midpoint on each edge? Now if I'd done that using the top view, it would've put that line on the lower face of the 3D solid. So what I've also got now is the vertex one as well. Let's go and check that one out. Let's do another line and I'll come off of a vertex. And as you can see, there's my vertex there, my 3D vertex. So I'll come out now and I can use a center now like that. Do I want to go there? I'm not going to go there. I'm going to go over to the other vertex there like that. There's a vertex just there. And then I'm going to press enter to finish. Now those two lines, albeit the same are using different 3D object snaps. So what I've got there now is some lines that I can utilize that I could maybe join together and form a polyline. So let's do that, let's draw another couple of lines. And I'm going to use my 3D object snap. You can see that I'm going through each of them like that. And I'm going to repeat the line command, and go from there to there like that, and then press enter to finish. So I've now got those lines in place. I just want to check, I've got that line there. Let me just do a quick selection here for the moment. Yep, you can see there is a line there. Can you see snap, snap, snap there? So there is a line in place there. And I also need to check here, you can see there's a line in place there as well. Something you might want to do here, and this is something I often do is just check that the objects are actually there. So what I'm going to do is when I use my polyline edit tool, I'm going to type PE for Polyline Edit, like so, and I'm going to select a polyline. Now this line here, I can't really select easily. So how do I select a polyline while I can click and I can drag? Can I click? No, I can't click anything really. It's really difficult to select. I kind of have to move around a little bit. And there you go, I've got it there. Takes a little bit of fiddling around, and you might need to do a little bit more of an orbit so that you can select it, but just be careful with that pick box. So I'm going to say yes to that, and then join the other objects. Now this is easy cause I can do a crossing selection now, so I'll get that in the right place. Crossing selection there, crossing selection there, and then hold down shift and just deselect the solid. You don't want the solid becoming part of the polyline, not that it would anyway. It wouldn't allow it to happen. So if I now press enter, I've now got a poly line there and I'll just hit escape to come out of the poly polyline edit, come on. So I've got a polyline there now, which means I should be able to extrude that polyline. So I'll come up here, there's my extrude there, and I'll just select the polyline, try and get it dead on. Again, takes a little bit of moving around, you'll notice how do I select my polyline? There you go, got it, press enter. Just make sure you move that crosshair where you need it to go. And I'll give this an extrude value of 25. And there we go. We've got an extrude there sitting on top. Now it's all in x-ray at the moment. So it's kind of looking a bit weird and wonderful because that's kind of, it is on top as you can see, but the x-ray is making it look a bit weird. If I change the visual style to something like conceptual. As you can see, it's sitting on top quite nicely. And then we've got two separate solids. We've got that one there and that one there. So what we might want to do is join these two, our existing 3D solid. So what we do is we come up here to solid editing. There's our union there. So I'll select union, and I'll basically select the objects to union together, so 1, 2, 3, press enter. And that is now all one 3D solid, utilizing those 3D object snaps that we used earlier. So that's how clever those little 3D object snaps are. So when you're working in 3D modeling, make sure that you switch on those 3D object snaps. It'll make your life a lot easier. And like I said, keep an eye on that little pick box when you're moving it and selecting objects in your 3D model. It can be a little bit fiddly at times, you'll soon get used to it. As you can see, I still have a few little issues with it here and there, it happens, unfortunately, it's just one of those little accuracy things that you get used to over time.

Contents