How To Create Dynamic Blocks In Autocad 2015

Dynamic blocks have so many uses in AutoCAD based drawings it is hard to count all the possibilities. In this article I would like to demonstrate how a dynamic block can solve a revision table problem. In the title block shown below there are a limited number of revision lines. Often during the drawing revision history more than six revisions will be made. When the seventh revision rolls around you have two choices, add a revision line to the top of the table or erase the oldest revision replacing it with the newest.

Blog14 If you choose the second option, you grit your teeth as you lose revision history which you worry that someday will be critical. I would like to offer a third option of adding a revision table that is a dynamic block. Actually the entire title block is the dynamic block, the revision table is created with the dynamic block visibility parameter. If you select the dynamic block selection icon, you will see there are three sets of revision attributes stacked on top of each other and you can cycle between the ones you wish to edit or review.

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The great thing about the dynamic block method is that you do not lose your revision history. All the revision history is stored in the drawing. It may not be visible until you select a different visibility state, but it is there saved in the dynamic block.

I will not go into how to create this dynamic block but I will give you a few warnings. The first is to save the drawing you used to create the three levels of attributes. Once you merge them together, they are very difficult to separate if you need to edit them or add new visibility states. In my construction drawing, shown below, I show the three states and three lines indicating the alignment point used to combine them together in position in the revision table. If you lose this point you will regret it.

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The next warning is to only use the Block Editor to do any changes to the block. If you are an old school AutoCAD user you probably used the "Edit Block In Place" command. If you use this command the following message will be displayed, select cancel quickly. Learn to use the Block Editor!

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The last warning is about exploding the dynamic block. I hope it never comes to this but if you have to make sure your use the Block Editor and make the current state visible before exploding the dynamic block. All states that are not visible, in the current state, are deleted.

Explore other uses for dynamic blocks in title blocks. Another example is a company that has multiple locations that would like to share the same title block. They can use the same type of visibility dynamic block to show different addresses and/or logos. Use your imagination.

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