Free AutoCAD Tutorials and Tips

How to add custom hatch in CAD?

Issue:

You want to add your customized hatch pattern in ZWCAD+.

Solution:

You can use you customized hatch pattern by these steps:

Step 1: copy hatch pattern file to ZWCAD+ installation folder, for example: C:\Program Files\ZWCAD+ 2012

Step 2: run HATCH command in ZWCAD+, open Hatch Pattern Palette dialog box and go to Custom tag, there you can find the customized hatch pattern you just add.

Note: you can also add the path where the pattern is saved in your computer to the Hatch Pattern File Search Path, in this way you don’t need to copy the pattern into ZWCAD+.

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You may like more threads about “hatch pattern” on CAD forum:

CAD hot tips: merge layers in order to move all the objects on a certain layer onto another layer.

Issue:

There are so many layers in the drawing and some of them are redundant. You want to put all the objects from a redundant layer onto another layer, is that a quick way to make it?

Solution:

Use command LAYMRG. This command enables to merge selected layers into a target layer, removing the previous layers from the drawing. It is useful to get rid of unwanted layers in CAD.

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You may like more threads about “layer merge” on CAD forum:

1. How can I isolate the specifiedlayer in AutoCAD?

2. How to put an icon for layerunisolate on the toolbar?

3. UseCAD Layer Merge (LAYMRG) to move the objects from one layer to another.

4. Howto merge a large number of layers in a quick way?

5. What’sthe command line layer merge

6. Onwhich layers should you create blocks?

7. Renamelayers and/or combine entities on those layers onto a new layer lisp

8. Transferall objects from one layer to another

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How to get free 3D orbit viewing quickly in CAD?

Issue:

The 3D Orbit is convenient to control the interactive viewing of objects in 3D. But running it may be a bit inconvenient, you need to run command RTROT or select it from toolbar. Is that any short cut key to run it?

Solution:

The short cut key to run 3D Orbit is Ctrl+Shift+the left mouse click.

As a bonus tips, there are more short cut keys for 3D viewing:

· Ctrl+Left mouse button: Realtime 3D Zooming

· Ctrl+Right mouse button: Realtime 3D Paning

· Ctrl+Shift+Right mouse button: 3D orbit around Z-axis

ZWCAD hot tips: how to use image as render material?

Issue:

There are a lot of materials in ZWCAD+ render Material dialog box, but sometimes you may want to use an image as material.

Solution:

Run command MATERIALS to open the material editing dialog box, press NEW button to create new material, select ‘Image’ in the Pattern Type drop-down list, then you can Browse to import image as material.

ZWCAD tips: how to convert Mtext to Text?

Issue:

Sometime you may want to convert Mtext to Text.

Solution:

There are two ways to convert Mtext to Text:

1. Express> Text> convert Mtext to Text.

2. Use EXPLODE command to convert Mtext to Text.

Another article talk about MTEXT here

Questions about "MTEXT" in CAD Forum

1. Text to Mtext and back

2. MText plotting - text color

3. Lisp routine to convert objects into Text or Mtext

4. Is it possible to change the width factor with MTEXT

How to Draw a Cone with Round Top and Square Bottom in 2D CAD?

Many CAD users may be very familiar with the object—cone with round top and square bottom. Here I would like to explain to some of CAD beginners what this is and how to draw it. First of all, this special cone is often used as a transition part to join together square and circle pipeline. Next I will use ZWCAD and ZW3D to draw this object.

A:ZWCAD

1. Draw the following graph and adopt the isometric view to finish the rest of operation.

2. Lift the circle inside the square for certain height in the direction of Z axis

3. Use the command Loft and the following graph will be gernerated.

4. Solid edit the graph and then color it

Execute the command of Solidedit and choose the 3d oject. When there’s reminder that the 3 surfaces are found, hit on the ENTER button and type in “a”, choose the outside surface you would like to keep as noted below.

With the above steps, we have finished the drawing of a cone with round top and square bottom in ZWCAD.

B: ZW3D is very cost-effective CAD/CAM software. In ZW3D, we can use the same steps as above (sketch—loft—solidedit). But it is somewhat difficult to unfold this model through above drawing steps as generally speaking sheet metal will always be unfolded for measurement. When outside contour only has one surface we can use Unfold Surface in Curved Surface to achieve it, while when there are 8 surfaces in the outside contour, regardless of the thickness, we will not be able to find the way to unfold the object.

Users can choose either ZWCAD or ZW3D to draw this object. The two CAD software will both meet your needs.

Related Questions:

1. SolidEdit in LISP

2. solidedit -won't work ??

3. Loft (ing) shapes with 3ds max 9

4. Can't loft: selected entities not valid

5. What’s the difference between ZWCAD and ZW3D?

How to Create Custom Linetype for CAD?

One of the commonly encountered problems is that the linetypes provided by CAD software can’t satisfy various demands in CAD Design. In order to make the design work easier, I will talk about how to create custom linetype in ZWCAD in today’sCAD topic,

To create the custom linetype, let’s start with the rules in customization.

In the ZWCAD, we can find a zwcad.lin file in C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\ZWSoft\ZWCAD\2012\en-US\Support . Open the file by Notepad, and the linetypes provided by CAD have been listed.

*BORDER,Border __ __ . __ __ . __ __ . __ __ . __ __ .
A, 12.700, -6.350, 12.700, -6.350, 0, -6.350

The linetype definition is composed of two parts. The first part is name and description for the particular line. Start the definition with “*”, then we could name the line. Leave a simple description after the comma. Specify the codes of lines in the second part. “A “ stands for alignment. The first parameter value should be equal to or more than “0”. The second parameter value should be less than “0”. Positive value means drawing a straight line with certain length. “0” means draw a point. Negative value means space. The punctuation after codes should be input with half-width.

Let’s take the center line as an example. The source code for which is A,1.250,-0.25,0.25,-0.25，According to the definition rules stated above, it means drawing a line with length of 1.25, ‘-0.25’ means a space with length of 0.25, ‘0.25’ means a line with length of 0.25.

If you are still not so clear about how to customize the linetype, you could draw the line first. Here is an example for double dot dash line. Let’s see how it’s defined.