From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

Working with Zoom and Pan - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

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Working with Zoom and Pan

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- [Narrator] We're starting a new chapter now where we're going to take a look at how we navigate our drawings in AutoCAD. Now, we've got a drawing open that you may recognize. It's our floor plan again and this time, it's got a specific file name. It's 00gnd for ground and then floorplan.dwg. So, as you can see at the top of the screen, 000gndfloorplan.gwd. You know the drill by now. Download it from the library to follow along with the videos in this chapter. Now, the floor plan itself is a pretty simple floor plan. You can see we've got the grid lines, the dimensions, the layout of the floor, and so on. And it's all in, in this case, metric millimeters. So, we're now drawing and what we want to do is we want to be able to get around our drawing. Now, this isn't a big drawing by any sort of shape or form. But, obviously, we want to be able to zoom and pan and move around in our drawing. Now, the benefit you've got is you're running AutoCAD on Windows. That means you've got a keyboard and a mouse. They're known as human interface devices and the lovely thing about the mouse is it allows you to zoom and pan within your AutoCAD drawings. So you've got the crosshair, sometimes known as the cursor, and that crosshair can be positioned anywhere in your floor plan. Now you'll notice in this central area here, we've got a conference table and a conference room. Get the crosshair over that conference room and just roll up on the wheel a few notches and you'll notice AutoCAD uses the crosshair at the center of zoom. So, I can get in really close and really tight to our conference table. If I now hold down the wheel on the mouse, a little hand appears and as I move around, you're kind of gripping the drawing and panning around the drawing like so. When I release that mouse button like that, that mouse wheel button, can you see there? That I'm back to the crosshair again. Now, if I position the crosshair over the conference table and roll back towards me on the wheel, it zooms me back out again like so. But I can zoom out a long, long way. Now, if I do that by mistake, just double-click on the wheel of your mouse and it will automatically zoom to the extent of the visible drawn object again. So you can see that your mouse allows you to zoom in and zoom out really quickly and really easily. We do cover another method of zooming later on called real-time zoon and real-time pan. We'll cover that in one of the later chapters. Just before we leave this video though, one of the things that you can do is utilize your navigation bar in AutoCAD over here. Now, your navigation bar should be on by default and in the middle there, if you click on the fly out, you can see we've got various zoom tools available. So you're looking for the magnifying glass. That icon there and the little fly out arrow underneath. And then you select which zoom function you want. Now, if you haven't got your navigation bar onscreen, type NAV like that. Now, can you see the first one that pops up is navbardisplay. Click on that and your navbardisplay system variable should be set to one, which means it's on. If it's set to zero, I'll type in zero and press enter, it'll disappear, it's not there. So if your nav bar isn't displaying like that, just type nav. The suggestion menu, you will see navbardisplay. Select it, make sure it is set to one. Press enter and there's your navigation bar. Now you'll notice, like I said, on the little fly out there, you've got various tools available. I'll show you one little bonus one there. The zoom window is great. I use it all the time. Click on zoom window. It'll ask you to specify the first corner of your zoom window. So you click once, release the mouse button, drag the window, click again, and it zooms you to the extent of that window you've just specified. Incredibly useful, right? Now, let's say that you want to get back out again. You can come back over here to the navigation bar and use zoom previous. It takes you back to the previous zoom that you were zoomed in or out at. Now, like I said though, one of the things with that double-click on the mouse wheel, if you zoomed in real close and you can't see the woods through the trees. Just double-click on the wheel of the mouse and it'll zoom to the extent of the visible drawn objects and thus, orientate yourself again within your AutoCAD drawing.

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