2D Drawing Tutorial for Complete beginner

[Knightmove]

Hello Guys

I'm looking for someone to point me towards a tutorial of source of information to help with replacing a set of damaged drawings.

I had an old set of plans of a trawler that have been badly damaged and I would like to replace them, I only have a set of JPEG's that a friend gave to me.

I'm a complete novice with autocad but would like help, if someone knows a tutorial that would get me started i'd really appreciate that.

Martin

[john.vellek]

Hi @Knightmove,

The image you provided is going to be tricky to work from.  If you want to try and trace it you can use IMAGEATTACH to place a link to the JPG into a current drawing. Then you can draw on top of it using lines, polylines, splines, and arcs.

You might take a look at YouTube for some help on these features.

Please select the Accept as Solution button if my post solves your issue or answers your question.

[maxim_k · Accepted solution]

Hi Martin,

Plain AutoCAD and even more so AutoCAD for Mac doesn't have any special tools for converting raster images to AutoCAD objects. If you want to use only AutoCAD for Mac for restoring damaged drawings, the only one way is to scan them (300 dpi resolution will be enough), then attach scanned images to drawing and trace everything manually using polylines, splines, arc, lines objects.

If you want to automate the process somehow and you are on Mac, you can try to use third party applications to convert raster data to vectors. For example - Illustrator, and even free Inkscape, can trace raster images. You can also find a lot of raster to vector conversion applications in MAS.

Maxim

[john.vellek · Accepted solution]

Hi @Knightmove,

I took your image file into Photoshop and cleaned it up and set it to greyscale.  I then brought it into Illustrator to trace the raster image but the drawing was not clean enough.

Then I opened AutoCAD (I used Windows in my example but the Mac version works the same). I used IMAGEATTACH to bring the image in at 0,0 and at a scale of 1.

I then created a new layer to place my linework.  I made that layer current and using arcs and lines traced on top of the image.

This is not a very accurate process but I hope it gets you closer to what you want to accomplish.

Please select the Accept as Solution button if my post solves your issue or answers your question.