2D or 3D ?? which one or both?

[fredJME3H]

Hello Chaps,

I am new to autocad 2018 and will probably have quite a few entry level questions over the next few weeks -

so please be patient with me and in advance many thanks for all your advice

a question about 2D or 3D

I have experience in 2d drawings and this is my program of choice.

I have downloaded autocad 2018 and It appears to have both 2d and 3d capabilities.

Firstly how do I set autocad to open in 2d mode?

Does the program run either in 2D or in 3D or do both work concurrently?

regards fred

[Alfred.NESWADBA]

Hi,

>> Firstly how do I set autocad to open in 2d mode?

>> Does the program run either in 2D or in 3D or do both work concurrently?

AutoCAD does not have a "2D mode" (nor a "3D mode"), you can always work in the way you want, some objects (like circle) are 2D-objects, but to place them anywhere in the 3D space you can first define a user coordinate system which is the the "construction plane" for your circle.

What you might see is that there is a workspace (>>>details<<<) which hold more 2D commands and other workspaces with 3D commands, but you can switch between them within your work as you like.

- alfred -

[dbroad]

There is also a template, acad3d.dwt, that might make it easier to start 3d modeling when using primitives.

[fredJME3H]

Thank you for the input

I dont  understand how the 2D and the 3D come together ? Is there perhaps a video tutorial

which demonstrates this?

best regards

fred

[dbroad]

I teach a semester long CAD class, which includes 3D. Love to have you sign up.  If you're in a hurry though, buy a good AutoCAD book, turn on the 3d Modeling workspace, start playing around and hitting the F1 button.

[leeminardi]

Rather than thinking of AutoCAD as “running in 2D or 3D” think of a giant 3D volume (the AutoCAD world space).  Lines, arcs, text, dimension line etc. can be placed anywhere and at any orientation in that 3 dimensional space.  Users who only need to work in 2D can ignore the 3D aspect of the world they are working in.  For the 2D users, when they add a line from  1.2, 3.1 to 4.3, 5.5 they are actually adding a line from 1.2, 3.1, 0.0 to 4.3, 5.5, 0.0.   The z coordinates for everything they do is automatically assigned 0.0.  AutoCAD will typically add a 0.0 z coordinate if only x,y coordinates are specified.  

AutoCAD uses the term “workspace” which I think is a bit misleading. A workspace is simply a label for a set of AutoCAD functions that are displayed in the user interface (primarily the ribbon at the top of the screen).  The “Drafting & Annotation” workspace displays a wide variety of features that are important to 2D users.  You will not see 3D features such as creating boxes, cylinders and other 3D primitives in the ribbons.  Change the workspace to “3D Modeling” and you will now see features for creating a Box, extruding a 2D shape into 3D, as well as 3D Move and 3D rotate.   No matter what the active workspace however, you can work in 2D or 3D. For example, when the “Drafting & Annotation” workspace is active you could give the line command followed by x,y,z coordinates for the line’s endpoints thus creating a line in 3D while working in the supposedly 2D drafting world.

It is not clear to me if you want to work in 3D or stay in 2D and are just concerned that you may be inadvertently creating a problem with the 3D potential being there.