Revision Clouds! The other Clouds… that you can actually see.

I can’t believe it’s another rainy day here in Arizona; It’s a rare thing for the southwest desert.

So, I couldn’t think of a more fitting AutoCAD 2016 topic than to tell you about than the enhanced cloud features… Revision Clouds that is!

AutoCAD revision clouds have always been a neat little tool that everyone uses, BUT… have always been a pain to edit them after they were created… WHY YOU ASK? (Like we all didn’t know).

Just in case didn’t… The reason was once the revision cloud was created in the prior versions the end result looked like a zillion little arcs all touching endpoint to endpoint…because that’s what it was!

This made it virtually impossible to try to even attempt any type of editing for the most part,

not only that…  your CLOUD made you feel a lot like Schleprock! (Some of you know who that is.)

And that alone, made “ERASE” the most popular command to edit a Revision Cloud!

(Then you start over and make a new one.)

Now for the Silver Lining…

In AutoCAD 2016 Revision Clouds have much for flexibility and the number of grips has been reduced based on the type of Revision Cloud you create! Revision Clouds are accessible from the Annotate Ribbon tab on the Markup panel or in the Home Tab in the Draw panel dropdown (Or REVCLOUD for you type’ers out there). During creation it offers 3 different methods: Rectangular, Polygonal and Freehand. Just like most AutoCAD options, the last one used will the default for the next time you run the command. You can also set your own default selection using the REVCLOUDCREATEMODE system variable. Also, during the creation method you can choose the following options to get the desired creation and appearance you desire.

After that when you need to edit one of them, by simply using the grips you can now adjust the boundary shape of your Revision Cloud similar to editing a Polyline, (or Object) with its grips, the same way you would normally edit the object in AutoCAD, in example a circle has a center grip and 4 quadrants allowing you to edit the Revision Cloud just like you would a circle. In addition the hover grids also add more flexibility, like adding or removing vertices.

You can control the display of the grips back to the legacy display by turning off the REVCLOUDGRIPS.

Arc Length and Style still control the appearance of the Revision Cloud, in adjusting the bumpyness along with the Normal or Calligraphy style. But the newest option enhancement is the Modify option.

Here is how it works…

If you have an existing Revision Cloud created in AutoCAD 2016 and you want to change the boundary without having to edit using the grips you can use the new Modify option to draw new revision cloud segments off the existing one, and then then remove the segment between them.

This feature was #4 on the AUGI wishlist!  It’s nice to see a rainbow after the storm!

Until next time keep your feet on the ground and your head in the REVClouds!

Tags: AutoCAD 2016, New Features

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