Drawing things to scale....HELP!

[Chrissypoo29]

So I will start off by saying that I am new to this program. So any advice you give would be great.  What I am trying to do is draw a house on a peice of land and make theland the corexct size in relation  to the house (draw it to scale) I can seem to figure this out.  PLease Help!

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

Illustrator is an illustration program for creating art and not a CAD program for developing schmatics.

You will need a plu in like CADTools and Perspective from http://www.hotdoor.com to do it the architectural way.

There is no real 3D space in Illustrator as well though it has a 3D Effect

[Eddie Ostrowski]

A good place to start:  http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/illustrator/articles/lrvid4269_ai.html

A better place to start:  http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Illustrator/14.0/WS714a382cdf7d304e7e07d0100196cbc5f-6479a.html#WS714a38...

[JETalmage]

Depends on what you mean by "drawing to scale." Drawing the piece of land and the house to the same scale is simple. Maintaining the relative size of the two objects to each other is also simple; just scale them both at the same time.

Illustrator is extremely limited, though, regarding the specific scales you can draw to. Its rulers can be set to Points, Picas, Inches, Millimeters, Centemeters, and the ill-conceived "Pixels" (same thing as Points). It provides no multiplier settings for ratios other than 1:1. So if your drawing scale is anything other than those measures, you have to do the math in your head, tediously enter multiplication factors in measure dialogs, etc.

Rabid Illustrator devotees will defend this program's archaic, decades-old limitations and missing features with absurd devotion. So whenever this common question arises, someone here trots out the ridiculous argument that "Illustrator isn't for technical drawing--get a CAD program."

Soon, someone will be along to suggest purchasing a third-party plug-in that costs half again what you paid for Illustrator, just to gain this common functionality.

Fact is, you're better off doing this in any drawing program that provides user-defined drawing scales. That doesn't require a CAD program. It only requires most any general-purpose drawing program, including FreeHand, Draw, Canvas, Xara Xtreme...even the drawing module of OpenOffice.

You'd probably want to put a few simple dimension lines on the drawing too, right? Illustrator doesn't do that, either.

JET

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

To scale means:

1/8, 1/16,1/32 scale. You know what they mean! They need a plug in. or

they have to do it in a CAD program.

[Eddie Ostrowski]

As James mentioned, if one doesn't mind to "...tediously enter multiplication factors in measure dialogs..." then Illustrator can do the job at hand. Is a plugin or CAD app absolutely necessary? I'd have to also agree that it is not. I also believe Wade had the best of intentions when he mentioned the use of a better suited app/plugin to aid in scaling, especially when there could be countless dimensions to scale (depending on the complexity of the house and terrain). If I may suggest to the person asking for help, since you are new to Illustrator, for you to research SketchUp (v7) by Google. It's free, quite easy to learn (fantastic online tutorials), it caters to architectual renderings (including terrain and cutaways) and it's 3D. If your house isn't a detailed mansion, you could probably learn enough of SketchUp and complete your assignment definitely within 8 hours time. Good luck with your project.

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

Until Illustrator gets a real three d space I would say that it is

would be not exactly the right choice for this though I sometimes use

it this way.

[nosajjason]

see if this helps!

https://www.hotdoor.com/cadtools/

here is another one. great place that has been helpful. i use concatenate (?) often when working between cad and ill.

http://rj-graffix.com/software/plugins.html

good luck.

[TenLongFingers · Accepted solution]

I know this is really old, but I found this thread while asking the same question, and this is how I did it. Maybe it'll help someone else.

I'm drawing a swimming pool perimeter to scale in Illustrator (illustration for a math course). Two sides have to be 12 ft and one side is 32.

I used the line tool (\), clicked on the screen, and made a 12 pt line, a 12 pt line, and a 32 pt line. Then I just joined all the paths to make it a closed shape, and transformed it from there. Holding shift keeps it from distorting when you scale it.