From the course: AutoCAD 2025 Essential Training

Working in model space and paper space in AutoCAD - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2025 Essential Training

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Working in model space and paper space in AutoCAD

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- [Instructor] We're staying in our 00groundfloorplan.dwg file, and we're going to take a look in this video at what they call model space and paper space in AutoCAD. They're also defined by your tabs, the model tab and the layout tabs. So your layout tabs are paper space, your model tab is model space. Now, at the moment in the drawing, we are in the model tab. So we are in what is commonly known as model space. This is where you do all your designing, your drafting, and create a drawing such as this floor plan. You normally draw everything full size in your model tab. So you'll notice at the moment, if you look at the dimensions on the drawing, you can see they're all in metric millimeters and they're all measured out real life full size. So you can see going across the top there, we've got 9601 millimeters, 10363 millimeters, and 9601 again between the grid lines. Now if I go and measure anything such as a door opening, that would also be in context with those dimensions between the grids. Also, it's a good bit of CAD practice. Whenever you get a drawing from somebody else, go and measure a distance on that drawing in the model tab so that you know what units you're working in. So if I measure a door opening, say in this drawing and it's 900, you know that that is millimeters in context. If it was 0.9, it would be meters. If it was say 36, that might be 36 inches. If it was three, it might be three feet. Just to give you an idea of conversion between units. We are using metric millimeters in this particular drawing and everything is drawn full size in the model tab. Now, there's no way you would be able to get this full size floor plan onto a drawing sheet to obviously communicate your design intent. So this is where paper space or the layout tabs come in. Now you'll notice in this particular drawing we have an ISO A1-Landscape tab here. Now normally, by default, layout tabs are like layout one, and here a default one, layout two. I've renamed layout one as ISO A1-Landscape. So if you click on it, it is set to an ISO A1 sheet size. Basically that sheet is the size of an A1 sheet, which is 841 millimeters by 594 millimeters. So roughly speaking 0.8 meters by 0.5 meters is the size of the sheet. Now you might obviously publish that electronically or on paper or whatever, but you're never going to get that floor plan onto that sheet of paper. So in your layout tabs, your paper space, you use what they call scaled view ports. So you'll notice this gray box here is a view port. If I hover over it, it's at a standard scale of one to 100. So basically everything inside that view port is what is in the model tab, but it's 100th of its original size. If I double click inside the viewport, you'll notice it goes a bolder kind of gray. And you'll notice now that we've got all the functionality that we would normally have in model space, we've got the view cube, navigation bar, and you'll notice the cross hair appears and I can hold down the wheel on the mouse and I can pan like so. And I do not recommend zooming because you will potentially mess up the scale. Now, I don't recommend that you do this, but I'll just show you how it works. If I roll back on the wheel now it's just like being in model space, but the scale has now changed from one to 100. You can check that down here on your status bar. So we're not using a recognized scale anymore. So if that happens, you just click on the fly out here, set it back to one to 100, you might need to hold down the wheel on the mouse and do a little bit of panning to get it to re-sit inside the viewport. You then move the cross hair outside the boundary of the viewport, double click, and you deactivate the viewport. Now that viewport is deactivated, if I hover over it again, you can see it's 100th of its original size. So that's how you work with model space and paper space in AutoCAD using the model tabs and the layout tabs. So as we work through the course, you'll see how to set up a view port and publish your drawings and so on. So we will work on that later. But I just wanted to get that concept across to you now so that you understand how it works because every time you're in model, if we go back to the model tab, you are working full size, real life dimensions. You should always do that to the units that you specified. So in this model tab, metric millimeters, and it's full size in the model tab.

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