Jonnoxx

Thanks, Perry.

Gosh, you guys are fast off the blocks! Thanks! Scott - you have zillions of videos. Can you point to a more specific one. Joe - Now I'm really confused. I'm well aware CA is a 3D program, and that's exactly how I'm trying to use it. I want to model it in 3D, but I want to stick in a reference drawing as an UNDERLAY, so that i can just "draw" (not quite the proper term, but you know what I mean) the walls USING this reference. This is an entirely normal way of starting off in Archicad and Revit. Or what am I missing?

I want to model a simple, 2-story house from an existing drawing. This drawing exists as a large single-page dwg file that shows multiple views (most but not all, at the same scale), showing the separate floor-plans for the "ground floor'; the "first floor", and the "site-plan". I'm not interested in more than this at this stage. So I just want to start off with making 3 reference drawings for each of these "floors", and save them into my plan, and then correctly associate them with each "floor". And then be able to call up these references at will any time. Do I just import this large dwg file, ONCE, and then pan and zoom into each required view one-at-a-time, rotate the view 90 deg as necessary, save it. And then immediately continue to just pan and zoom to the next one of the other plan views on the drawing and repeat the process? Or must I "cut" each view out of the original dwg, and save that separately? And start all over again each time? So how should I do this? And most importantly ... the part that has me really confused ... how do I afterwards see and update and manage the three reference drawings I saved? Must I create new layers, and put each of these drawings on its own layer? I do understand the basics of HOW to import and scale a dwg or pdf, but I'm confused as to how to MANAGE these drawings AFTER that. Also, how do I fix these drawings so that they have a reference point that ACCURATELY stacks them ontop of each other correctly? I'm very much a newbie at this, and can't find an easy - and clear - answer to what is probably quite a simple issue. I would really appreciate some explicit idiot-proof help here.