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Mike Williams is an AutoCAD specialist who will help you to improve your competencies with AutoCAD 2010 and its new features.
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Dynamic Blocks - Door Block Example 4: BasePoint (video)
Your challenge is to figure out how to add the ability to drag your block by the basepoint grip, regardless of the flip state. And be on the lookout for the next episode of “Mike’s Tips” where we will explore this feature in depth.
In this lesson, we are going to continue learning about dynamic blocks as we continue to develop our door symbol block. In the last lesson, I left you with an assignment to add the ability to flip your door to the other side of the wall. My hope is that you were able to accomplish that assignment by using the tips and techniques you’ve learned from these lessons.
In today’s lesson, we will learn how to add to our block the ability to change its base point. If you test your block, you will notice that our base point is at the hinge line of the door. But if you flip the door, the base point doesn’t move with it. As a matter of fact, when you flip your door, you won’t even be able to see your base point. This is a problem, since users need to be able to select the base point grip regardless of its current flip state.
To fix this problem, close your test block window and open your block authoring pallet. Select the parameters tab, and you will see a parameter “basepoint”. Select the “basepoint parameter” and assign it to the hinge line of your door. The basepoint parameter doesn’t have a corresponding basepoint action. Instead, we want to add this parameter to our selection set in our flip action.
You can do this by selecting your flip action, open your properties pallet, and look at the very bottom where it is titled “selection set”. It should currently have a value around “10 objects”. We’ve seen in other lesson that we can add to our selection set by selecting the action and using our right-click menu. But I wanted to show you that under certain circumstances, you can also add to your selection set through the properties palette as well. If you select in the box where it list the number of items selected, will notice three dots appear. If you click those dots and look down at the command line, you will notice it says “specify selection set for action”. You can choose to select a new selection set, or you can modify the existing selection set. Type “M” for modify and select the “basepoint parameter” to add it the selection set and then press the Enter key. Repeat this process for the flip action that flips the door to the other side of the wall.
Test your block once again and notice if you flip your door, the basepoint will flip to the other side as well. So now we have the ability to grip our door’s base point and “drag its location around, regardless of the door swing.
In many of our lessons, we have been using a “trial and error” approach to developing our block. I highly recommend this method of adding one action at a time and then testing your block. If you add several all at once, it’s much harder to troubleshoot in the event of an error. And when you test your block, make sure you test all the different combinations of actions to ensure they all work properly together.
