My tip today is a quick one. This is something I managed to go years without knowing and so when I noticed myself using it today I thought I would share. Everyone uses “Nudge”; simply select and object and use the arrow keys to move said object slightly. But what if you want to move it more than just a little bit? Hold down the shift key and the nudge distance will increase by a factor of 10.
When I was getting started in the industry I was paying off bills by being a woodworker. During my time I was fortunate enough to be at the cutting edge of the business and seeing all of the machinery become computerized and in some cases automated. So this topic has always interested me in all industries and as new things develop I am always in awe, so when I came across the following C|NET article I was impressed again. It has a short video of flying robots assembling a tower of blocks per a specified design. I know this is in a controlled environment and many of the comments in the post elude to this but think of the potential…
This year I got talked into helping out with a program called ACE Mentor Program. Although I was hesitant to jump into this because I was unsure of the time commitment it would take I am really glad that I did sign up. It is a program designed to engage and enlighten high school students into the Architecture, Construction and Engineering industries. There are affiliate programs set up in 32 of the 50 states educating and helping students get into our industry. Not only is the educational for the students there is also opportunity for these students to be awarded scholarships for winning the competitions in their area. If you don’t have the time to volunteer at least spread the word to help this program grow.
I got on my iPad this morning and noticed that Autodesk had released an update for the Design Review Mobile app. I was hoping that this upgraded version would allow me to take my redlines back to the cloud and see them on my desktop. Well that feature isn’t there yet but they did open it up for other languages and the viewing of pdf documents you have stored on your cloud account. As usual some bugs got fixed which is always a good thing.
This does bring me to an iPad or iPhone tip. If you hit the Home Button and the Power button simultaniously then it will create a screen capture of your device. Since we cant’t get any Design Review redlines back to the cloud at least you can use this tip to email those captured redlines to the person who needs them.
This is a tool that seems to be underutilized when I visits firms, yet a tool that is very useful when it comes time to setting up construction documentation. If there has ever come a need to show one objected hidden behind another, there is a tool for that. On the View tab in the Graphics panel there is a command called Show Hidden Lines, this tool allows for an element to be picked an that needs to see the dashed line through, then the element to be hidden.
As usually the status bar will always display the steps needed to accomplish a command.
One tip I usually talk about when using this command is to go into Wireframe, other wise it is really hard to get the element that is being hidden. Once the command is done the view can be put back into Hidden Line mode to see the effects. In the example below I did this with a partial height wall that was being covered with a counter top to display the wall below.
Another little tip about this tool is that is also works with detail components and modeled elements. A modeled element can be displayed hidden through a detail component that has a masking region built into it. The example below shows this for a plate detail component over a modeled structural beam.
