Tutorial: Setting up AutoCAD Lineweights

Lineweights in CAD can be a bit difficult until you learn the tricks. At my school they taught us that you can set up lineweights in two ways; by layer and by color. You can also use both to setup lineweights, though sometimes they can cause issues when printing. This tutorial goes through the basics of setting up your lineweights in AutoCAD using these two methods.

Tutorial: Hand Rendering Elevations

Hand Rendered Elevation

Elevations are an important part of architectural design. There are many ways to create elevations. You can use Sketchup, AutoCAD, Revit or one of the many other rendering programs out there. Creating a three dimensional model for elevations is very time consuming and creating a two dimensional elevations in AutoCAD also requires a lot of time and effort to get the right textures and line weights, much less taking the time to render them in Photoshop. Thus, the quickest way to create an elevation is to complete them by hand. This way you can also choose the detail of the rendering depending on the amount of time you have as well as work through elevation iterations to define your ideas without the hassle of computer rendering.

Jane Jacobs: The Life and Death of Great American Cities

5th Avenue New York City

In Jane Jacobs’ book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she discusses the particular nature of cities. The introduction focuses on how City Beautiful and the Radiant City differs from how cities truly work and how cities have suffered as a result of these ideals.

William H. Whyte - Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

Marilyn Moedinger Lecture: Adventures in the Vernacular

Marylin's SOM Fellowship Travels - source

Design Help: Closet Dimensions

Woman's Reach-in Closet - Source

Standard Depth Measurements

For reach-in closets, the standard depth is 24 inches and is used for suits, shirts, dresses, and pants. The 2 foot depth is required to handle your hanger. For coats and jackets, use a depth of 28 inches.

• Minimum depth 24 inches 
• Use a depth of 28 inches for coats 

Photoshop: Transform a Picture into an Architectural Blueprint

Creating a blueprint in Photoshop is fairly easy and straight forward. The following video by Blue Lightning TV outlines all the steps and techniques in order to transform a picture into an architectural blueprint. There are also many interesting tips and trick in this video with layering, brushes and masking tips.

Humor: By Architects for Architects

Check out this funny video from BXL Design Architects in Australia.

Architectural Rendering: Using Scale People

When adding people to an architectural render it is important to keep them in scale so everything about the render looks correct. So how do I keep them in scale and where do I find people to add?

In AutoCAD

The first way is to add people into your AutoCAD drawing before you import them into Photoshop. This is the simplest way to keep people to scale. There are free CAD blocks online with people that you can add to your building drawings. The blocks are generally not too well defined and you can't manipulate the people too much in Photoshop once imported along with your building drawing. If you are doing quick renderings, keeping people in your imported drawing would help you save a bit of time.

AutoCAD: Menubar

Even after they created the ribbon in AutoCAD, sometimes the best way to work with CAD is to use the menubar. To show or hide the menubar is quite simple. Type in the command MENUBAR and hit enter or the spacebar. Then it will prompt you to enter a new value for the MENUBAR. Entering 0 will hide the menubar and 1 will show the menubar.

Command: MENUBAR  hit enter or spacebar

Option 0 : will hide the menubar

Option 1: will show the menubar

More AutoCAD Tips and Hints from the Architecture Student Blog

Design Help: Dimensions and Colors

I found these links while doing research for studio and I thought they were worth sharing. The following links outline standard closet dimensions, general home and office dimensions like chair and railing heights as well as RGB color codes while working in Photoshop or Indesign.

Closet Dimensions
Standard Dimensions - This link is broken, hopefully only due to website maintenance
RGB Color Codes

AutoCAD: Getting the Tabs on the bottom back

Tutorial: Hand Drafting

Picking Lead

Everyone has different handwriting styles which creates the need for different types of leads as well as the need for depth in architectural plans and renderings. B Leads are darker and as you get to 9B they become more and more charcoal like. When starting to draft, always use an H, generally 4H to 9H. They are lighter in shade, with a harder lead that erases the easiest. Just be careful not to write/draw too hard, it will indent the paper resulting in issues with paper texture and eraser. You can also get a ghosting affect when shading.

Architecture Student: AutoCAD Tip Compilation

This Post is a Library in process...

Show Lineweights

Lineweights in CAD

To show lineweights in AutoCAD, just click on the icon at the bottom. This can be problematic while drafting in modelspace, though helpful in paperspace. When you can see line weights and the plot style helps you edit your drawings without going to plot preview. To set up a black and white paperspace with plot styles, see Setting up CAD Paperspace with plot styles and line weights.

Top 10 Things you'll never hear your architecture professor say

Need a laugh? Check out Doug Patt's Top 10 things you'll never hear your architecture professor say.

Photoshop: How to Watercolor Images

To create a picture that looks like a watercolor in Photoshop is fairly simple once you have learned the basics of Photoshop. Just follow these steps to turn your pictures into watercolors.

Architectural Rendering: Adding a Sky in Photoshop

Sky from cgtextures.com

There are many ways to add a sky in Photoshop to your renderings. You can add a solid color, a color with a gradient, a picture, multiple pictures, or all of the above. This post goes through the different ways to add a sky in Photoshop.

Importing a pdf into Photoshop

The linework in a CAD PDF file is stored as vector data rather than raster data used by Photoshop, so when you bring the file into Photoshop, you will be given options on how want to import the PDF and convert the file. The import window also allows you to input a pixel resolution for the new imported file and double check the file size. Follow the steps below.

Tutorial: Learn to Create an Architectural Section Render in Photoshop

Cardiff Bay School Section - David Schnabel

Learning to render in Photoshop starts with Photoshop basics and once you understand them, you can start to learn how to render architectural drawings. It is also important to learn how to use AutoCAD, Revit, Sketchup or other programs that allow you to create architecture drawings to scale. You can also sketch/draft a section and scan into the computer. Once you have a plan, section, perspective or other drawing you can start to render them in Photoshop. In CAD and Revit you can print a pdf to scale, then import it into Photoshop to keep the scale accurate. Double check to make sure it looks to scale when you import it to be sure. I have yet to figure out how to get Sketchup to export to scale. Scale isn't always that important so use your judgement when you start thinking about how you want to do a drawing. The work flow, steps and videos below outlines the the steps to create an architectural section render in Photoshop.

Websites to Supplement your CAD Drawings for Free

When working on a drawing in AutoCAD, it is sometimes difficult to find blocks and drawings to supplement your drawings. The list below are websites that I have found that have free CAD drawings and blocks to help give that extra punch to your drawings. Many also have forums and articles to help you with your CAD-ing.