Home & SEARCH

North Island

South Island

International

This Site

The Drawings

C.A.D programs

Contribute

Tutorials:

View & Print these drawings in:

Rhino

Free CAD drawing Viewer
All you need to view and print any drawing on this site with step by step instructions

View & print dwg plans of the Wellington State Opera House. Once the drawing is loaded into the cad program, check the scale, choose which layers you are interested in, and print the drawing at a relevant scale as follows:

1] Download & install ProgeCAD LT - www.progecad.com/

2] Download the file operahse.dwg from this site.

3] Start ProgeCAD LT and From File / Open navigate to the folder where you downloaded the oprahse file to, and open the file "oprahse.dwg"

4] The screen remains blank - don't panic. Type z [press enter] e [press enter] - this zooms the drawing out to its extents so you can see it all. You could also use the zoom extents icon at the top of the screen - Notice the set of icons at the top of the screen that look like magnifying glasses with different graphics in them - these are pretty standard among all windows CAD programs - rest your mouse over them to get the pop up text which tells you what command each carries out.

5] Use the "zoom window" icon to enlarge the scale at the lower right part of the drawing - click the icon and then move the cursor to the lower right side of the drawing and click once to create an anchor point, then, still holding down the mouse button down, move the mouse so a selection rectangle encloses the area that is to be enlarged and then release the button. The drawing will enlarge to that area. If you mess up, click the "zoom extents" icon and try again.

Muck about with the above a bit until you get the hang of it -eventually, zoom window into the part of the drawing at bottom right that shows the scale - in fact zoom into the scale so you can see the first 5 metres comfortably.

6] Hold the shift key down and click the right mouse button. From the pop-up snaps menu, choose "Endpoint snap".

7] Type dist and [press enter] - this starts the distance command - notice the command line is prompting you to pick two points to measure the distance between. Move your mouse over the end of the line denoting the zero point in the scale - notice a small yellow box appears when the cursor is close to this end point, indicating that it recognises the end point. When this happens, left click once to set the first point, then move the mouse to the the line denoting the 5 meter point on the scale and, once the yellow box appears, left click once to finish the command.

8] The command line reads 5000.0000. Since this confirms what the scale reads - i.e. 5000 mm, we know that the drawing is properly scaled. You could now accurately dimension any other series of points on the drawing if you wanted by using the various dimension commands.

9] Zoom extents, then type explayers and [press enter]. This brings up the layer explorer.
Here you can see what the various layers are that make up the drawing, plus what they are called, whether they are on or off, and what colour they are drawn in. You can also change any of this from this dialog..

Click the heading "Layer name". This sorts the layers by name in ascending order. (Clicking again sorts them by name in descending order) Change the current drawing layer (i.e. the active layer upon which you would draw) to L-stage by right clicking on it and then choosing "current" from the pop-up menu.
Then select all layers, [cntrl + a] and click the icon that looks like a pen and paper - (rest the mouse over the icon to get a tooltip the identifies it). Each time you click this icon all the selected layers will turn on or off. Turn them all off, then click once on the layer name L_LAYER to highlight it and click the icon again to turn it on.

Close the layer explorer, then zoom extents. Just the entities on L_LAYER are displayed and at full screen.

10] Open the layer dialog again, and turn on the following layers L-Stage, L-Aud, L-SR. Close the layer explorer, then zoom extents. This shows us just a long section of the auditorium & stage, plus details of features on the stage right wall.

11] Print the drawing at a scale of 1:200 - Choose File / plot . From this dialog set the printer paper to A4 landscape. In the print dialog:

• Scale/View Tab: - check extents; uncheck "Fit print area..."; In user defined scale check millimetre's; Printed units = 1; drawing units =200
• Advanced Tab: - check "center on page"

Use the print preview button to preview the print, and print the drawing if you wish

Carry out similar operations to print other parts of the drawing at various scales and, depending on your printer, on various other sizes of paper.

Note you can print to PDF on any size paper by choosing the ProgeSOFT PDF Wizard as the printer.