- We're staying in our new office project dot DWG file.
You can see it's still zoomed in on the bin store
where we were working in the previous video.
So just double-click on the wheel of the mouse
to zoom-extent like so, so you can see all of the drawing.
What we're going to look at now is creating an AutoCAD block.
Now, there are some objects already in this drawing
that are AutoCAD blocks.
We've got the computer, that's a block thing,
so it's a block reference.
We've got the chair, that is also a block reference.
The desk you'll find is also a block reference
as is our little pop plan on our desk as well.
Now, what we are going to do,
we're going to basically make
this the entire little workstation into one block.
But what we're going to do first,
is we're going to go to our layer properties here,
we're going to click on new layer,
and we're going to create a new layer and call it workstations,
and we'll give it a color.
Don't mind what color you want to put it on.
I'm going to go with a nice magentary type color, color 210.
I'll click on Okay.
Make sure it's linetype continuous,
and default lineweight as well.
And then double-click next to it
on the little sheet of paper
to make workstations the current drafting layer.
Then we're going to close the Layer Properties Manager.
Now, we've created a new layer there
because what I'm going to do is convert this chair,
desk, computer, and plant into one block,
and we're going to put those blocks
onto the workstation's layer.
Now, what I'm going to do
is go to the Insert tab on the ribbon here,
and you can see there's a Create Block option there.
Click on the flyout,
there's also a White Block option.
We'll look at that in a moment.
Let's go to Create Block first.
That'll bring up the Block Definition dialogue box.
Now what we're going to do, we're going to give this a name.
So we're going to call it workstation.
Surprise, surprise!
Block has to have a name like that.
And then we're going to go to Pick point for the base point.
That's going to be nice and easy.
It's going to be that corner there off the desk.
You see the endpoint snap?
Left-click.
As you can see,
there's no way I could have calculated
those X and Y values either.
Now we need to select the objects
that are going to make up the block.
Now we are using existing blocks in the drawing;
the chair, the desk, the computer, and the plant.
So what we're doing,
we're creating a block using what they call nested blocks.
So we're creating a block of blocks.
There's nothing to stop you
creating a block of separate objects.
So for example, the desk, the chair,
the computer, et cetera,
they were all created from lines, arcs, circles, and so on,
and then converted into blocks.
Somebody's already done that for me.
So I'm going to create a new block from these blocks.
So I'm going to select the objects
that are going to make up my workstation block.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the desk,
the chair, the computer, and the plant like that.
And then just press Enter to confirm.
Can you see?
I'll get a little preview there like so,
and four objects are selected.
Now what we're going to do,
is we're going to use the Delete option,
and I'm going to deliberately use that for the shock factor
because it will delete the original objects
that make up the block.
It's not going to be an annotative block.
So this block is unticked.
Scale uniformly;
yes, please, we want to scale it in both directions,
the X and Y directions, if we do scale it for size.
And always allow exploding,
then you can explode your block
back to its original objects,
make some changes,
and perhaps create a separate block as well.
Block unit will be millimeters.
This drawing is a metric millimeters drawing,
we could potentially include a hyperlink as well
if you wanted to,
and we can also give it a description.
So we're going to put this as office workstation like that.
And we'll also put there as well,
make sure that people know
it is a metric millimeters block like so.
The unit is set to millimeters obviously,
and we can also open it in the block editor,
which I'm not going to show you just yet.
So make sure that that is unticked.
When you click on Okay now,
basically, those objects will disappear as if by magic.
Now let's go back to the Home tab on the ribbon,
just check that we're on the workstations layer,
we should be already,
we did set it up at the beginning of the video.
What I'm going to do, is go back to the Insert tab now,
and I'm going to hover here over Insert on the Block panel.
And when you can see here, I've got chair, desk, et cetera,
I've got title blocks and things,
if I come down the list all the way to the end,
there's my workstation.
I just click on it,
it comes into the drawing or like so,
pick that little end point there and click,
and now that is a block on the workstations layer,
but it's all one object.
So much easier to move around,
so much easier to manipulate in your AutoCAD drawings.
And that's how you create a simple block in AutoCAD.