AutoCAD Working with references

Introduction

As soon as you start working on large projects, it will become evident that working together with other students is necessary to achieve good results.

Fortunately AutoCAD offers us the possibility to do this in an efficient way. If for instance an architect wants to work on the layout of the interior, and a construction specialist wants to work on the construction in the same model and at the same time, they can make use off the reference functionality in AutoCAD.

As an example we'll reference a location to the plan of the faculty of architecture:

Files and settings

The file with the faculty of architecture will serve as the primary file in which the file of the location will be imported:

In order to do this, we first need to make sure that we're working in the correct scale by typing units in the command bar and pressing [Enter]:

In the Units window that now appears, make sure that Insertion scale is set to millimeters:

Inserting a Reference

Now it's possible to reference the location file to the faculty file by going to: Insert > Xref Manager

The Xref manager appears, right now its blank because no files have been referenced yet. So lets attach the location by clicking attach:

Now select attachment and relative path (see the image below) It's important to make sure that all files are in the same folder, so the location file needs to be in the same folder as the faculty of architecture file. This not only gives you a clear overview of all your files, but this also makes sure that Autocad is able to find the reference files when working on different computers.

While the External Reference window