Designers work in real-world units when using CAD software such as gCADPlus. In practice, if you work in the USA, you will create the design using decimal feet as the base unit. If you worked in the metric system, your base unit would be mm. Every component in the design should be drawn full size in modelspace and not to scale. That means an inquiry, such as measuring a distance, will report values that are meaningful to the designer and, by inference, to the construction team.
When presenting the design on paper, we create a viewport on a layout on a sheet of paper chosen from a range of paper sizes. A viewport is a window or a portion of the modelspace drawing area that provides a view of the objects in the drawing. Creating viewports allows you to have multiple views of the same drawing in a single layout sheet, each displaying a different part of the drawing. Viewports help create scaled, sectional, or detailed views of a drawing – the model. Viewports can be resized, moved, and arranged on the layout page to suit your needs, and each viewport can be configured with its display properties, such as layer visibility, view style, and scale.
The figure below shows a design for a site in the USA. It was drawn full-size in modelspace and full-size using decimal feet as the base unit. When complete, the design was displayed on several layout spaces, each complete with a border, a title block with site details, and the designer’s logo, ready for printing. The figure below shows an example printed from an architectural C-size layout sheet. Note that a plant schedule is included and automatically generated using one of the tools in the specialist gCADPlus drop-down menu. These views in the layout space are most important because they provide a quick impression of the design’s appearance before printing.
A short movie showing how to create a new layout showing part of a master plan for a site in the NEW of the USA.
How to create a new layout -step by step
Select the Format drop-down menu, then choose Create Layout.
A Page Setup dialogue box appears. A new layout is created by selecting the button at the top left of the dialogue box. The desired sheet size can then be selected from the drop-down list. Rather than accept the sheet size for the attached default printer, it is recommended that you choose a sheet size appropriate for your final plot and scale.
Tip: To identify wrongly placed entities, use the zoom extents option in model space before using the create layout tool.
Tip: It is recommended that you give each of the layouts a meaningful name. If you work in the USA, the first sheet might be labelled A1 Sheet 1:100, but Architectural C size 1/48 is equally good.
After a while, you will likely dispense with the sheet name in the title as the Layout Manager can determine this. Names such as front entrance, wetland, deck, demolish, rear garden, etc., then become the norm.
Click OK, and the new layout is created. You can switch to it by clicking on its tab at the bottom of the drawing editor.
The view will likely be zoomed in. To display the entire sheet, right-click and select the zoom extent option. The design, drawn in the current colour, will be seen inside the border of the layout sheet.
To rotate a view, select the floating viewport and type a new angle in the properties box. Your chosen angle will rotate all entities, including text.
We take a design for redeveloping some primary school surroundings and show how it can rotate views inside floating viewports. Rotation affected the orientation of text applied using the AUTOLABEL tool. We showed a strategy to overcome that issue.
A designer wishes to show different options for the layout of the entertaining space on a single sheet. The basic design for the space is at an angle, so we square things up by rotating the layout, floating viewport ‘porthole’ used to view the design. We also demonstrate that by separating alternative options on different layers, it is possible to use the VPLAYER tool to achieve our aim.