AutoCAD 2009 – Status Bar

Ok, I know the status bar is not rocket surgery, but, there were a few tweaks that happened to it in AutoCAD 2009. Who likes icons? Who likes text? Doesn’t matter. Pick the one you want and that is how you will see the toggle buttons on the far left of the status bar. The toggle buttons toggle certain settings on or off. These settings include SNAP, GRID, ORTHO, POLAR, OSNAP, OTRACK, DUCS, DYN, LWT, AND QP. QP?? Yeah, the new Quick Properties function. What’s that? Later my friend, I can post everything in one day, especially this late on a Friday. Well, the quick properties is a new function that will display some basic properties of an item or object when it is selected. Think of it as a miniature Properties Pallet that shows up with one click!! It’s cool. Each user can set up which properties that are displayed in the QP.

Back to topic. Switching from icons or text for the toggle buttons is a simple as right clicking one of the button and selecting/deselecting the USE ICON option. Use the one you like best. Right clicking certain toggle buttons will provide you with more settings for that particular function. It is very easy to manipulate these settings now.

The model and the layout buttons are now on the right side of the status bar along with some new tools. The layout flyout has been replaced with the QUICK VIEW Layouts (I’ll get into this one later) and the QUICK VIEW Drawings buttons (again, later). These new functions quickly display the open drawings and the layouts in the current file giving a small preview of them and allowing for selection. The status bar now also includes the newest tools meant for easy navigation and viewing. These are the Steering Wheel (just like in Design Review), Show Motion, pan, zoom (classics), a new workspace switching station (which takes up less space now in the status bar), and the new Viewport/Annotation toggle that replaces the annotation scale button in order to sync the annotation scale with the view port scale.

That’s the new Status Bar. Not too flashy, but it locates some of the new tools and revamps several familiar ones.

Happy Cadding!!

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Impression – Styles

AutoDesk’s Impression software is a color rendering application that creates non-photo realistic images. It was designed to provide a digital means of producing rendered drawings that closely resemble the more traditional method of hand rendering. This is primarily accomplished through the use STYLES. Impression styles work just like any other type of style in the Autodesk world. They have a name and settings. Each style, whether out of the box, or self-generated, can be altered at any time. Do what you need to do.

Styles are saved in the drawing (Impression file extensions are .IRF) they are created in. BUT, users can export them to a styles library for future use. This works great when working on multiple drawings from the same project, or for working on different but similar projects. Just bring them in and apply the style as needed.

Styles are basically applied to a layer. In Impression 2 we have the autolayer feature. This will automatically assign items layers. You can add a style different ways, to a layer or to an object. The easiest way to apply a style to a layer is to select the style, click it, drag it and drop it on the layer you want it on. Very simple. Or, to change an objects style, select the object (a fill pattern for example), then change the style name setting to the layer you want. You can click and drag a style on top of an abject, but it will only add the new style on top of the old style. You might not want that. But this is a method to use to try and get unique effects, so keep that in mind.

Altering a style is simple enough. Select the style you want, and then make any changes you need or want. Save the file and add it to your library for future use.

Styles are the backbone of Impression. I suggest messing the settings just to see what you can do with them. I’ll get more in depth with them as time goes on.

Happy CADDING!

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