- [Instructor] We're staying
in our metal plate 002.dwg file.
And what we're going to have a look at now,
is setting up some dimension styles.
Now, just before we do that,
go to the Home tab on the ribbon
and jump into your Layers panel
and click on the flyout here
and select Dimensions as your current drafting layer.
We're going to be placing some dimension shortly.
So it's always a good idea to be ahead of the game
and have the layer set up and ready to go.
Now, you've got a choice here,
like we did with the text styles,
you can go to the Annotation flyout here,
and you can get to your dimension styles there
in the Annotation panel on the Home tab on the ribbon.
Personally, if I'm annotating, I go to the Annotate tab
and I utilize the Dimensions panel here.
Now, there's one reason I utilize the Dimensions panel.
In the later versions of AutoCAD,
you have a Dimension Layer Override,
so I can override and say that all my dimensions
always go on the Dimensions layer.
Now, the reason I do that is obviously it's quick and easy
and I don't have to think about the layer
but it overrides the layer here,
in our layer drop down in our Layers panel.
So if I'm in the Annotate tab,
and I know that I've got this one set up correctly
to the right layer,
I know that all my dimensions
are going to go on the right layer.
So that's Dim Layer Override it's called.
And also on the Dimensions panel here,
I can just click on this little arrow here,
and jump into my Dimension Style Manager.
Now, we're going to start working with a new dimension style.
So what we can do is we click on New like so,
and the new style name, I'm just going to call it Training
and then an underscore and then ANNO, A-N-N-O.
We're going to make it annotative.
And it's always a good idea maybe
to put that in caps as well,
then it stands out like that.
I'm going to start with the ISO-25 style,
because it's just got some nice settings
that I like to use on a regular basis.
That's one of the default AutoCAD dimension styles.
I'm going to make it annotative.
And in this particular course,
we're going to use it for all dimension types
like so, all dimensions.
Then I click on Continue,
and it'll open up a very large dialogue box.
Start at the Lines tab over here
on the left-hand, top corner.
And we're going to work a way through
setting up a dimension style
for use with metric millimeters.
Now, I stress metric millimeters,
one, because I'm in the UK
and I always use metric millimeters in my AutoCAD drawings,
but also bear in mind that this could be any type of units.
And you would work with settings
that obviously a apply to whatever units you're using.
So if you were working in feet and inches,
the settings in your dimension style
would tally up with feet and inches.
You wouldn't use the same sort of settings
that I'm using for millimeters, for example.
So in the Lines tab, in the dialogue box
we're going to go and look at our dimension lines.
Now, our dimension lines
are the lines that go between the arrowheads
as you can see in the preview there.
And as I start to change these to ByLayer,
because dimensions is my current drafting layer
and it's red,
you can see everything start to update to red.
Baseline spacing, I'm going to make that at 10 millimeters
for use with the baseline function on the dimensions panel.
And then the extension lines
are these little vertical lines
you can see on this dimension here
and these angled lines here.
And your extension lines come off of the geometry
and allow you to place your dimension line.
And again, we want them all to be ByLayer.
Then when you make a change to your Layer,
all of your dimensions update at the same time.
So you might change the color of your dimensions layer
and it means every single dimension
on the drawing that you've placed
their color will update based on the dimension style.
Now, we're also going to have
the Extend beyond dimension lines there.
So I'm going to make that 2.5.
And then if I press Tab,
and make this offset from origin four and Tab again,
can you see that we've got a nice gap now
from the origin points on the geometry?
Now, there are some settings here
that you can fool around with,
so I can suppress dimension line 1.
Can you see half the dimension line disappears?
Dimension line 2,
it's the other half of the dimension line.
I can also place over extension line 1.
And can you see there,
where I'm placing over extension line 1 and ticking it.
You can see that obviously, extension line 1 disappears
or extension line 2 disappears.
Quite random looking
and I've never, ever suppressed extension lines or dim lines
in whole of my AutoCAD career, but some people do.
So obviously, it's there as a feature in the software.
Symbols and Arrows at the top of the dialogue box is next.
Now, I prefer closed filled arrowheads,
but you could go for something like architectural ticks.
Depends on the environment,
possibly the discipline that you're working in,
but I prefer the closed filled arrowheads.
When you select Closed Filled for the first arrowhead,
the second arrowhead adopts the same arrowhead style.
Leaders though, I prefer to use a filled dot like that.
We'll talk about leaders in a little while.
And the Arrow size,
I'm going to make that 3.5 millimeters
to tally up with my 3.5 millimeters notes in my Layout tabs.
Center marks, we don't need to worry about anymore.
We actually have center marks
and center lines as objects in AutoCAD now.
So I'm going to set that to None
If you just pop up here,
see it gray out at the top of the screen.
In the Annotate tab on the ribbon,
you have a Centerlines panel,
there's center mark, there's center line.
So those tools can be used at any time in the drawing
rather than worrying about them in a dimension style.
Break size, we can leave at 3.75 millimeters.
And Arc length symbol,
I always have my arc length symbol preceding
the dimension text in an arc length dimension.
If you're placing any jogged radius dimensions,
your jog angle is 45 degrees by default.
And if you're placing any linear jogs,
it's 1.5 times the text height.
Now, you can vary these depending on
whether you are working in millimeters,
meters, feet, and inches, et cetera.
It's up to you, all of these parameters
are updateable and changeable.
I'm going to jump to the Text tab.
Now, Text style, remember I mentioned
that there was a dims model text style in the drawing?
Well, that's the one we're going to use,
and it uses the Calibri font,
like the text styles that we set up previously.
Text color, again, ByLayer.
and you'll see it update in the preview.
You can add a fill color if you want to,
I can make it yellow,
which is a bit layery, to say the least.
I'm going to set that to None though.
Text height to tie in with my notes, 3.5 millimeters.
I could even draw a frame around the text if I wanted to.
I'm not going to though, so I'll untick it.
You'll notice the vertical placement of your text
is above the dimension line each time.
The horizontal placement is centered
along the dimension line.
View direction is left to right,
right to left allows you to work with different projections,
different orthographic projections,
but just make sure it's left to right for now.
Offset from the dim line is going to be 1.5 millimeters.
Now, text alignment, I can have everything horizontal.
I can align with the dimension line
or I can use the ISO standard.
The ISO standard means that you've got a little crank
for things like radii and diameters.
Like that radius 11.17 there.
I prefer aligned with the dimension line,
it's a little bit more economical on space
and real estate in your drawings.
Moving along to the Fit tab now.
The only thing you need to make sure of here
is that the Annotative box is ticked.
The rest of this is set up to make sure that AutoCAD
kind of does what it sees as is best in your drawings.
You can edit dimensions anyway in AutoCAD.
So if you just let AutoCAD take the lead here,
and if you're not happy with the result,
you can update it later.
Primary Units we're going to work with.
My unit format is decimal,
but again, it could be architectural,
which is feet and inches but I'm going to be using decimal.
And I'm going to be using two decimal places.
The decimal separator for me would normally be a period,
a full stop, a decimal place, whatever you may call it.
Autodesk is an American company,
so it tends to be the word period.
European countries tend to use the comma,
other countries tend to use the space.
It depends again on country standards,
your location standards,
your localization settings, everything else.
I'm going to use period,
which gives me a little dot as you can see.
Now, you don't need to worry about anything like round off,
prefix or suffix at this point.
Suffice to say that if I did put suffix in there
of millimeters, for example, and then press Tab,
not only will I have millimeters
for all my linear style dimensions,
but then I'd have 60 degrees millimeters.
So it's not such a good idea.
However, if we started creating dimensions subfamilies,
that's when you could maybe think about that
and apply millimeters only to things like linear dimensions,
aligned dimensions, and radius dimensions.
Zero suppression can be set for your linear dimensions.
So what we can do here is
if we switch trailing on,
that means if we've got a dimension that is exactly 12.00,
it'll basically turn off the trailing zeros.
We can do the same for decimal degrees here.
So if I take that up or decimal places,
can you see we've got four decimal places there?
If I switch that to trailing like that,
what I can do is obviously if this is exactly 60
and I took it to say two decimal places, can you see there?
If I switch the trailing off,
the two zeros come back at the end.
So just make sure that you got trailing on,
just keeps your dimensions neat and tidy.
You can also set up alternate units, if you wish.
Now, if I display alternate units
and went for something like architectural,
you can just see there in the preview
that I've got my metric dimension
followed in brackets by my imperial dimension.
I used to work in the petrochemical industry a lot,
and we worked with a lot of
sort of what I would call overseas
and international clients.
So a lot of the time we always did metric
and imperial dimensions like this
to make sure that it didn't matter
which country the drawings went to.
People could understand the dimensions.
I'm going to display alternate units off like that
by unticking the box.
And then tolerances, I can add and deviations
and things if I wanted to.
And you can see there, I can put in plus or minus and so on.
And if I change the upper value to two
and the lower value to two and Tab that,
can you see I've got a plus or minus two?
We're not going to use any tolerances,
but you can see how they work as well
on same mechanical engineering drawing.
So we've got everything set up in our new dimension style.
So I'm going to click on OK now,
and it adds it to the list.
The good thing is I can tell it's annotative
'cause it's got this little blue symbol in front of it.
That is really important.
It must be annotative for what we're going to do next
in the next few videos.
Select Training_ANNO from the list,
click on Set Current and then click on Close.
And you'll see up here Training_ANNO,
can you see it just changed there?
So training a is now my current dimension style
in my AutoCAD drawing.