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AutoCAD provides smooth view transitions whenever you use the nonrealtime pan and zoom commands. Sometimes you can get lost if you do a ZOOM All from a small, highly magnified area. It’s a bad idea to leave a trail of breadcrumbs across your screen, so these slow-motion pans and zooms may be fine, at least until you do know your way out of the forest . . . or your drawing. If, like us, you find that this feature gets old fast in 2D drawings, there’s a View Transitions dialog box (type VTOPTIONS to open it) in which you can turn it off. Just deselect the Enable Animation for Pan & Zoom option. On the other hand, it can be most useful in 3D work.

Some of the zoom options take some getting used to. We recommend that you use the mouse wheel for most of your zooming and panning. Supplement it with Zoom Window to move quickly into a precise area, Zoom Previous to go back in zoom/pan time, and Zoom All or Zoom Extents to view your whole drawing.

If you’re wondering about those other ZOOM command options — the ones we suggest are less important (Dynamic, Center, Scale, In, and Out), look up ZOOM in the online help’s Command Reference section. Zoom Dynamic is an old, old command option that’s been made redundant by the Realtime option. As for the remaining options, you can probably get to the view you want by deft movements with your wheel mouse (you are using a wheel mouse, aren’t you?).

A View by Any Other Name . . .

If you find yourself repeatedly zooming and panning to the same area, you can probably get there faster with a named view. After you name and save a view of a particular area of your drawing, you can return to that area quickly by restoring the view. You use the VIEW command, which displays the View Manager dialog box, to create and restore named views.

The View Manager manages shots as well as views. Views have been a part of AutoCAD from very early days, but shots are a recent addition. While views are static, shots are motion based. (In regular AutoCAD, but not AutoCAD LT, you may have noticed the ShowMotion button on the Navigation bar.) And not only can you create animated scenes, you can even add fancy transitions like jump cuts and fades. We introduce you to shots (the nonpotable kind!) and the ShowMotion feature in Part V of this book.

Follow these steps to create a named view:

1.Zoom and pan until you find the area of the drawing to which you want to assign a name.

2.On the Ribbon’s View tab, choose View Manager from the Views panel.

The View Manager dialog box appears.

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3.Click New.

The New View/Shot Properties dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 12-4.

Figure 12-4: Save a view into your drawing.

4.Type a name in the View Name text box.

5.(Optional) Type a new category in the View Category box or select an existing one from the drop-down list.

You create your own View Categories to organize views and certain display characteristics of views. This feature is used mainly in sheet sets. If you aren’t using sheet sets, you can leave this box blank.

6.Make sure that the View Type drop-down is set to Still.

Visit the online help if you want to know more about the Cinematic and Recorded Walk options.

AutoCAD LT doesn’t support view types. The New View dialog box in LT is missing the View Type list box, most of the Settings drop-downs, and the Background area shown in Figure 12-4.

7.In the Boundary area, select the Current Display radio button, if it’s not selected already.

If you want to save a different view boundary, select the Define Window radio button instead, click the Define View Window button to the right of it, and pick two corners of the region’s boundary (as if you were zooming windows).

8.Confirm or change the choices in the Settings area.

If you select the Save Layer Snapshot with View check box, when you later restore the view, AutoCAD also will restore the layer visibility

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settings (On/Off and Freeze/Thaw) that were in effect when you created the view. (Chapter 6 describes the layer visibility settings.) The Live Section and Visual Style settings are primarily for 3D drawings; these two settings aren’t included in AutoCAD LT.

9.Click OK.

The New View/Shot Properties (New View in AutoCAD LT) dialog box disappears, and you see your new named view in the list in the View Manager dialog box.

10.Click OK.

The View Manager dialog box disappears.

To restore a named view, proceed as follows:

1.Go back to the Ribbon’s View tab and choose View Manager from the View panel.

Alternatively, type VIEW (or V) and press Enter. The View Manager dialog box appears.

2.In the Views list, expand either Model Views or Layout Views (depending on where you saved your view).

3.Click the name of the view that you want to restore, click the Set Current button, and then click OK to close the dialog box.

You also can plot the area defined by a named view. See Chapter 16 for instructions on plotting views.

AutoCAD (but not AutoCAD LT) has an extremely handy set of model space viewport controls. There are three of these in-canvas controls at the top-left corner of the drawing area:

[-][+]: Double-click [-] to toggle between a single model space viewport that fills the drawing area and (by default) four equally sized viewports configured for 3D viewing. Click once to display a menu with options to reconfigure the viewport layout, and to toggle the display of the ViewCube, SteeringWheels, and Navigation bar.

[View name]: Click the current view name ([Top], for example) to open a menu listing all default and custom views in the drawing. Click a menu item to switch to a different view. You can also open the View Manager, and switch the view projection between parallel and perspective, which is normally only meaningful in 3D.

[Visual Style]: Click the current visual style name ([2D Wireframe], for example) to open a menu listing all the visual styles defined in the drawing (visual styles are most useful in 3D modeling, and we discuss them in Chapter 21). Click a menu item to switch to a different visual style, or to open the Visual Styles Manager palette.

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In both AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT, you can set named views current without having to open the View Manager dialog box. Just go to the Views panel on the View tab and choose a named view to restore from the list.

Looking Around in Layout Land

All the zoom, pan, and view operations we describe in this chapter work in paper space layouts as well as in model space. (Chapters 4 and 5 describe the differences between model space and paper space and how to navigate between the two.) One little complication exists, though: In a paper space layout — that is, any drawing area tab except for the Model tab — it’s possible for the crosshairs to be in either paper space or in model space inside a viewport. Zooming and panning produce different effects depending on which space your crosshairs are in at the moment. You switch between the two spaces, using the MSPACE (MS) and PSPACE (PS) commands.

Experiment with the different effects by following these steps:

1.Open a drawing that contains at least one paper space layout with a title block and one or more viewports.

If you don’t have any such drawings handy, try using one of the AutoCAD sample drawings that you can download from www.autodesk.com/ autocad-samples. For example, have a look at architectural__annotation_scaling_and_multileaders.dwg.

2.Click Quick View Layouts on the status bar and then click one of the layout preview images — that is, any image other than the Model preview image.

AutoCAD displays the paper space layout, including any title block and viewports. Click somewhere away from an image to dismiss the Quick View image bar.

3.Type PSPACE (or PS) and press Enter.

AutoCAD either switches to paper space or tells you that you’re already there.

Alternatively, you can double-click in the gray part of the drawing area or anywhere outside the viewport.

You should see the triangular paper space UCS icon at the lower-left corner of the display. If you don’t see an icon, click the View tab on the Ribbon and then click Show UCS Icon or Show UCS Icon at Origin on the Coordinates panel’s Show UCS Icon drop-down menu.

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Starting with AutoCAD 2012, the Coordinates panel was removed from the View tab in the Drafting & Annotation workspace. The good news is that you can put it back! To do so, with the View tab current, right-click anywhere in the Ribbon and choose Show Panels from the shortcut menu. Select Coordinates to permanently add this panel to the View tab.

Depending on your screen resolution, this might require other tabs to get narrower and some of their icons to move to their panel’s drop list.

The crosshairs are now in paper space, so zooming and panning changes the appearance of all the objects in the layout, including the title block.

4.Type Z, press Enter, type A, and then press Enter.

AutoCAD displays the entire layout, as shown in Figure 12-5.

Figure 12-5: The full layout.

As an alternative to typing — or to navigating through Ribbon panels — here’s an easier way to choose from a list of all available ZOOM options: Type Z and press Enter; then right-click in the drawing area to see the right-click menu, as shown in Figure 12-6.

5.Zoom and pan by using any of the techniques described in this chapter.

While you’re in paper space, zooming and panning change the magnification of the whole drawing layout, as shown in Figure 12-7. The effect is similar to moving a plotted sheet in and out and all around in front of your face.

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Figure 12-6: All (and Extents, and Window) is revealed when you right-click.

6.Return to a zoomed-all view by using any of these techniques; or type Z and press Enter, then type A and press Enter.

AutoCAD displays the entire layout again.

7.Type MSPACE (or MS) and press Enter.

Alternatively, you can double-click with the crosshairs over a viewport.

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Figure 12-7: Zooming in paper space.

You should see the model space UCS icon at the lower-left corner of the display (refer to Step 3 if you don’t see an icon). The crosshairs are now in model space, inside the viewport, so zooming and panning change only the display of the objects that are visible in the viewport. The display of the title block doesn’t change.

8. Zoom and pan by using any of the techniques described in this chapter.

Zooming and panning don’t change the appearance of the title block, as shown in Figure 12-8. The result looks as if you’re moving a picture of the model space geometry in and out and all around behind a frame.

In real drawings, you usually shouldn’t zoom and pan inside viewports after they’ve been set up (see Chapter 5). Doing so changes the scale of the viewport, which messes up plotting. We’re asking you to do it here only to illustrate the difference between zooming in paper space and zooming in a model space viewport.

If the title block changes when you zoom and pan, it means someone has locked the viewport to prevent the kind of mischief that we warn against in the previous paragraph. (You also see the command prompt

Viewport is view-locked. Switching to Paper space.) Refer to Chapter 5 for information on locking and unlocking viewports.

9.Choose Zoom Previous by using your favorite ZOOM technique one or more times until you’ve restored the original view.

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Figure 12-8: Showing nothing but the kitchen sink in a model space viewport.

10.Type PS and press Enter.

Always leave the crosshairs in paper space when you’re ready to call a drawing finished.

11.Click the Close window control in the upper-right corner of the drawing area. Click No to close the drawing without saving changes.

In this example, we have you close the drawing without saving changes just in case you did mess up the viewport zoom scale.

In most cases, you set up a paper space layout once (as described in Chapter 5) and then just return to it to plot. You shouldn’t be spending a lot of time zooming and panning in paper space layouts. You zoom and pan to get a better view of what you’re drawing and editing, and that’s what full-screen model space is for. But if you do want to zoom in paper space — to get a better look at part of your title block, for example — make sure that you’re doing it with the triangular paper space UCS icon on display at the lower-left corner of the drawing area.

The in-canvas viewport controls we describe earlier in the chapter are for manipulating model space, or tiled, viewports. The VPMAX and VPMIN commands allow you to maximize and minimize a viewport in the current layout. These commands provide an alternative to switching between the Model and Layout buttons without the potential problems of zooming inside of paper

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