- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now
about external reference files, sometimes known as xrefs.
You'll often hear people talking about xrefs
in your AutoCAD drawings.
An external reference file or x-ref
is a drawing that is attached to your host drawing.
It's like your paper clipping two drawings together
one on top of the other, so that you can see data
from the other drawing being externally referenced
into the host drawing that you're working with.
So, for the purposes of this chapter
we've got two drawings for you.
We've got the host drawing
which is the New Office Proposal.dwg file.
You can see that on the screen.
We also have a second drawing for you
called Landscaping Area which is a Landscaping area
like that, in a drawing out on its own in space
looking a bit lonely.
So, go back to the New Office Proposal file tab,
and what we're going to do,
we're going to bring the Landscaping Area
into our New Office Proposal host drawing
by way of it being an external reference file, an xref.
Now, we've got a layer in the drawing for you,
it's called XREFs.
So just make sure that you're on the layer XREFs,
so right down at the bottom of the layer drop down there
in the New Office Proposal drawing.
Now, what I would suggest that you do
to make your life easier is download both files
at the same time from the library,
New Office Proposal and Landscaping Area,
and just make sure they are in the same folder.
That way we don't have to think about file paths,
we can use what is called relative file pathing
which means that AutoCAD will look in the same folder
where the host drawing is for the reference drawing.
So what we're going to do,
we're going to add that Landscaping Area
to the right hand wall of our New Office Proposal,
that's our proposal for planning.
We're applying for planning for a new landscaped area
to the right of the building.
So, how do we do that?
How do we attach an external reference file?
Well the quickest way
is to go to the Insert tab on the ribbon,
and utilize the reference panel here.
That's the quickest way.
And the one way I would suggest
that you do it really quickly and easily,
is to go here like this and click there on the arrow
and just go here, Attach DWG file, quick and easy.
And the good thing is it looks in the same folder
as your host drawing.
So our host drawing is the New Office Proposal.dwg file,
and you'll see that the Landscaping Area drawing
is in the same folder.
That's the best way to work with external reference files.
Keep your reference files in the same folder
as your project drawings,
and perhaps have a different naming philosophy.
So you might have something like Xref-Landscaping Area
so that people know it's an xref.
I'm going to select the Landscaping Area drawing
as our reference file, that's going to be our xref attaching
to the New Office Proposal drawing.
Click on Open, and it'll take you
to the Attach External Reference dialogue box.
Now, you can see a little preview of the drawing here,
you can select a scale, an insertion point and so on.
Now, the path like I mentioned is relative in this case,
you can set it to No path or you can set it to Full path.
So, if your external reference files are elsewhere,
you can specify a full path.
Be aware though, if you use that full path,
and you're pointing to say xrefs on a server,
and somebody decides to change the location
of those drawings and move the folder,
AutoCAD will not find the xref files.
So full path it won't find them.
If they're in the same folder as the host drawing
using relative path, just quick and easy to find.
Now the scale is going to be 1 to 1,
so we don't need to change the scale.
Leave the X, Y, and Z values at 1,
you do not need to specify it on the screen,
you might want to set it to uniform scale,
then you know that if you set X to 1,
Y and Z are also going to be 1.
We don't need to worry about z,
we're not working in 3D, it's just the X and Y values.
Rotation, we need to leave the angle at 0,
and the insertion point,
we're actually going to leave that at 0,0,0
and not tick the box.
The reason being, is 0,0,0,
our origin in the New Office Proposal drawing
and the Landscaping Area are the same.
So basically this Landscaping Area
shares the same 0,0,0 point as our host drawing.
Last but not least over here, we've got Reference Type.
We've got Attachment or Overlay.
So if I bring this in as an attachment,
it means that if I then xref the New Office Proposal drawing
hence the xrefed Landscaping Area drawing again,
it means that both those drawings
will show in the subsequent next iteration of the xref.
If I set it to overlay, the xrefed Landscaping Area
won't appear in the next iteration of the xref,
because you can have xref after xref after xref.
If that's the case,
you need to look at how you're going to work
with attachments and overlays.
We're just doing a one-off,
so attachment is fine in this particular instance.
When I click on OK now,
you'll see that our Landscaping Area
is referenced in here on the right of the building,
and if I just look in here
in the external references palette,
there's our Landscaping Area there.
And if I click on it in the list there, can you see?
It kind of highlights which is kind of nice
when I click on it like that.
And it tells me that it's Attach,
can you see there's all the information there,
and the safe path just shows a little dot
because it's the relative path setting.
So I can now close the external references panel,
that can be closed,
and what I can do now is if I click on this, can you see?
Like so, it is its own external reference.
And the External Reference tab
appears up here on the ribbon.
And what we're going to do in this chapter
is work through some of these tools
in the external reference contextual tab on the ribbon.
Just hit Escape a couple of times to deselect your xref,
and we'll start looking
at external reference files in AutoCAD.