Autodesk AutoCAD Mechanical 2010: Basic Concepts Course

Welcome to the AutoCAD Mechanical 2010 Basic Concepts course. Now, as you'll notice if you've used AutoCAD before, the interface is ever so slightly different on AutoCAD Mechanical. You'll notice this immediately on the Home Tab here we've got different commands. You'll see there for example we have a symmetrical line command, a center line command. You'll notice that we have extra enhanced rectangles that we can draw for example there on the draw panel. What you'll also notice is here we have a new toolbar. This is to log in and out of a product called Vault, V-a-u-l-t. It's a document management system that works with AutoCAD Mechanical and Autodesk Inventor. Down at the bottom of the screen here you've got the usual icons for your drafting settings. What I'm going to do there is I'm going to right click on those and switch off Use Icons and you'll see there we've got author, polo, o snap, o track, dynamic and so on. You'll also notice that we've got this structural setting here, 2D Structure. If I right click on that you'll notice nothing changes. It's all to do with your workspaces here on the Workspaces pull-out. If I click here now and go to Structure, you'll notice it's very different. You'll see that I've got various tools and settings here and as you can see, there's my structure palette there and it's a structure catalog so if I've got a mechanical structure that I want to save and reuse, I can do so. There's the preview and there's the favorites there. External drawings I can bring it in from there or I can look at structures that are already in my current drawing for example. I'm going to close the Structure Catalog there and go back here to my mechanical workspace. So you'll notice it's different again there. Instead of 2D drafting and annotation, I've got a mechanical workspace, a structure workspace and a mechanical classic workspace. You'll notice there I can also save current as and generate my own workspaces. I'm going back to Mechanical there and that'll take me back to what we looked at initially. Now, you'll notice on the Draw Tools there's a new panel here; lots of new tools to use within AutoCAD mechanical. Let's have a look at the tabs here. I've got Insert; looks slightly different there. I've got IGS and step import tools for example, annotate. You'll see again I've got symbols there. We're working with Mechanical CAD so we've got surface textures, welding and so on, assembly properties, bills of materials. Notice the parametric looks very similar to AutoCAD content-wise; lots of new tools. Templates for screws, holes, templates for shafts and tools. When I go to the View Tab there again, viewport scale area, different properties, content libraries, mechanical layer manager. So you'll see there are differences there between the usual AutoCADs and AutoCAD Mechanical 2010. It is a mechanical design product that has links to Autodesk Inventor and other different file types. So we work through the AutoCAD Mechanical 2010 course, you'll see how things differ but more importantly you'll see how you can become a lot more productive using AutoCAD Mechanical 2010.  

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