Happy Holidays!
One of the great things about Autodesk University (yes...I'm still talking about AU) for me is that some people actually show up with goodies for me! How fabulous is that? I got some cool chocolates from Alaska (thanks Jack!), a wonderful Christmas snowman from Larry and Lisa (Larry is now on the AUGI Board), an AWESOME Colts Santa hat from a fellow Colts fan, and a very nice gentleman actually bought me a Black Knight doll (think Monty Python) when he went to see Spamalot! You Holy Grail fans will remember the fantastic Black Knight who lost all of his limbs but kept on fighting anyway ("It's only a Flesh Wound"). The doll has detachable arms and legs that have little bloody stumps when removed (those of you who are not Monty Python fans no doubt think there is something terribly morbid here). As you can see below my dog managed to get her paws on my new doll and...well...the result can be seen below...
And that would be a leg in her mouth. A great big thank you to the very nice man who gave me my very cool Black Knight Doll - wherever you are! In fact a great big thank you to all of you who brought me goodies - you really shouldn't have but know how much it is appreciated!
Last week I went on a very short tour to San Antonio and Austin, Texas with one of my favorite Autodesk resellers - DC CADD. Doug, Kim and his crew are so wonderful to work with and the venues were fantastic! First we had an event in Austin at Dave and Busters with about 200 attendees and the second event in San Antonio at a very trendy movie theatre (where they serve food and drinks!). I've attached a picture of my second audience (I forced them to give me a standing ovation...they needed to stretch their legs anyway).
An AutoCAD Hip Tip on Converting Layout Tabs to Model Space:
As I was wandering around on Autodesk.com I discovered a cool tool called EXPORTLAYOUT (free even) that will convert your AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT 2008 layouts to model space. This is extremely handy if you are working with another CAD system (are there other CAD systems?) that doesn't know how to deal with layouts. This preview tool (and I emphasize the word "preview") takes a snapshot of a drawing layout (along with floating viewports) and creates a ready-to-use model space drawing out of it. This will ensure that you can fully utilize the cool new 2008 tools like annotation scaling, layers per viewport, etc. All drawings are exported to AutoCAD 2007 format.
To download this cool tool simply go to Export Layout Preview.
Below is an explanation of some of the things that might occur in order to maintain visual fidelity:
- The same object displayed in multiple viewports becomes multiple objects in the exported Model drawing. In addition, objects are transformed and often scaled. Both of these can affect Data Extraction of blocks.
- Some objects are converted or exploded in order to trim them (should the viewport boundary clip an object)
- Viewports in a layout can each have a different visual style; only a single visual style can be used in the Model tab.
- Polylines with width that are clipped by the viewport boundary may not be accurately trimmed in the exported drawing.
For those of you with drawings that contain AEC objects - you'll have to throw in an extra step to get decent results:
1. Run the AECTOACAD command on the drawing.
2. Navigate to the converted drawing, and open it.
3. Run the EXPORTLAYOUT command.
It is also recommended to select the Bind option with Insert type when using the AECTOACAD command.
Note: The AECTOACAD command creates a new DWG file with all AEC objects exploded into basic AutoCAD objects.
Go ahead and give this preview tool a try! Consider it a holiday gift from me to you (do you like how I try to take credit for this cool tool?). Ho Ho Ho!
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