Drawing Layout
By D Cheshire Page 1 of 4
Creation of drawings from PRO/Engineer models is a straightforward task.
Completing a drawing can be broken down into two stages:-
1. Drawing Layout - Elements making up a drawing are brought
together. These include selecting a drawing sheet, positioning
views of your model on the sheet, adding cross-section or scaled
views, etc.
2. Drawing Detail - Adding information such as dimensions,
geometric tolerances and drawing notes to your drawing.
This document covers the f irst of these stages, drawing layout, the second
stage is covered in a companion document ProTutor05.
This drawing layout tutorial covers the following procedures…
• Creating a drawing sheet and assigning a model to the drawing.
• Positioning drawing views onto the drawing sheet. The position of
the first view of the specified model is important since it
determines the layout of other views. Subsequent views are
placed as projections of this view and PRO/Engineer automatically
determines the view orientation based on the projection mode.
• Additional views can be placed which are not projections. For
example it is often useful to add a 3D view (an isometric
projection) to the drawing as this can aid visualisation of the part.
• Cross-sections are also a useful tool for communicating ideas.
Cross-sections, either planar or dog legged, can be added and
numbered quite easily in PRO/Engineer.
The drawing tutorial is based on the main housing of a valve. The model
for this part can be found at the location where you found this document.
Copy the model called valve_housing to your directory before you start.
Creating a Drawing
A new drawing is created using FILE > NEW choosing the type as
DRAWING and giving a suitable name (valve_housing suggested). At this
point the drawing format definition dialog appears, as shown in Figure 1.
The default model will be set to none (unless you already have a model
open). Use the browse button to locate the model you want to create a
drawing of – in this case valve_housing.
Also from this dialog box the size of the drawing can be specified. W hen
you are choosing the size bear in mind the size of printer or plotter that is
available for the final output. If only an A4 printer is available then
choosing the A0 option is not sensible since by the time the page is shrunk
to fit on an A4 sheet the text will be unreadable. For student work it is
acceptable to choose an A3 format and plot this onto an A4 sheet as this
gives more room for dimensions to be shown. Another way of specifying
the size is to choose a Template or a Format. This is like starting with a
pre-printed drawing sheet with boxes for drawing title and other
information but we will show you how to add this in later. For this model
choose Empty, Landscape and select the A3 standard size.
Figure 1: Creating a new Drawing
A new window will be displayed in which your drawing will be created with
the file extension .DRW. If you have chosen one of the standard sheet
sizes a rectangle will be displayed indicating the extents of the drawing
sheet. All drawing should take place inside this rectangle. Figure 2 shows
the new drawing sheet, as it should appear on your screen.
Figure 2: A Drawing Sheet
