Regards, Charles Shade
CSHADEDESIGN | AUTOCAD LT | LT-KB | DYNAMIC BLOCKS
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Having to add areas of glazing for a Fire Engineer to do a take off, and being bored stiff (most of the way through an MBA yet I'm considered a glorified CAD operator!), decided to make a block to report the area of a rectangle.
Fairly simple, the principle could be repeated with other block types e.g. a flexible shape with a boundary defined by a polyline with 6 points and a grip at each corner to move it flexibly.
I did one up recently for a colleague who at times had been spending days doing nothing but layouts of storage units for a self-store company, putting polylines in for the area, then listing it, then manually taking off the area in mm2, converting that to m2 and ft2. All of that could be accomplished within a single block object.
His thanks was to delete it from the office system....
Oh well, that's morons for you.
Updated with now 6 points and 8 points as well as a rectangle, the text now scales as well, default size is 3.5mm for a range of selectable scales.
Also, a little tag block that allows a person to add an area note to a drawing, with an attribute for the name, you enter the area in the Properties palette and this is then formatted to m2 and converted to ft2.
Here are two dynamic blocks I've made for our hvac company. They end up with the same results but one is more straight forward and the other is a little more complex.
Maybe someone can use these to start their own d.b.
lesmaz,
which block and which parameters are you referring to?
I've posted several on this thread.
Charles.
Here's another section line tool. It actually took a surprising amount of time to get everything working the way I wanted it. Most notably, being able to scale the block for 1/4"=1' or 1/8"=1' while keeping the attributes located correctly and all of the linework remaining positioned the same - making the whole block annotative does not work... Also getting the polar stretches and linear/point stretches working together properly was a challenge. I like the linked arrow flip action (no more sheets with arrows facing opposite directions... 🙂 ) but wish you could chain flip actions rather than needing to use a lookup...
Here's my Isometric Box Truss Frame set of blocks. There's some more of them, but these 9 are enough to bring here to show and tell.
Thanks to everyone on the forums (especially you, Libbya! : ) ) for helping get me kickstarted on understanding alot of this stuff.
Before this project all of them had been pretty basic, and at times this thing seemed like too big a bite to chew. These I guess are all pretty basic too, there's just a lot that's gone into them.
These are almost all wipeout blocks since there's so much overlapping of objects, and the frames themselves get superimposed over other things that i get to draw.
Included in this post is "FriDO.lsp" draworder utility for the frame assemblies. It's easy to follow, and if you have a need, easy to mod. I put a few cupcakes in there too.
Take a look, and please, let me know what you think!
Thanks,
-Mark
It took me quite a while to figure this out, and most of it was through surfing the internet fruitlessly. I would like to thank AcadAdamLT for this post (http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/dynamic-blocks/mirrored-rotation-dynamic-block/m-p/3501600#M13999). It showed me esentially what I needed.
Here is my quick North arrow. Rotate it to to desired direction in 5° increments (too lazy to type 720 times) with a counter rotating "N".
This was done in AcadLT 2017, saved in 2010 Format.
Learning how to use a block properties table is useful, but you can do the same without the block properties table. Just use a chained point/move to move the N and rotate the point/move instead of the N. See attached. Add an increment if you prefer it that way or leave it limitless as is.
That makes sense, thank you. I am only now learning dynamic blocks, so I haven't actually used or tried everything yet.
Would there be a benefit to using your method vs what I have? Other than typing A LOT less! It does seem simpler, and simple is often the better way to go. Can dynamic blocks go awary similar to coding? A small error and it doesn't show up until who knows when, or too much data causing an overload on your computer.
Interesting
The benefits are the time involved in creation and the fact that the version using the point move has limitless adjustability whereas the block properties is always limited (in your case to 5 degree increments). Simpler is definitely more stable although I doubt your arrow block will give any trouble as is. I haven't used block properties tables very much as I tend to use lookups and double lookups instead.
If you post the file, it makes it a lot easier to see the issue. Regardless from your description I assume the issue is with the very last part of the last step you listed. You cannot 'select everything' for the rotate action. Selecting everything will result in the text being moved in a circle by the point/move AND also being rotated by the rotate action, basically rotating it twice. Remove the text from the rotate action and rotate only the point/move.
When a parameter is chained, then when it is moved/changed, all actions that are associated with it are performed based on the movement/change to the parameter.
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