By Dennis Collin
When working on drawings with blocks, referenced drawings or images it is often necessary to be able to clip the element with a polyline, rectangle, circle or similar. Clipped elements are ideal when placing information neatly onto sheets without showing superfluous information. AutoCAD has had standard clipping tools for many years, but these functions are limited to the selection of one single reference and one single boundary which needs to be a polyline entity type.
AutoCAD has a vast developer network who provide add-ins to make these tasks easier and more flexible in their operation. Locating the Multi-clip utility on the App store and installing it provides extra buttons on the Add-ins tab.
The Express Multi-clip utility provides the user with the ability to clip entities including blocks, XREFs and images with multiple boundaries. It also provides the option to remove boundaries of selected clipped objects. In addition, valid boundary types include not just polylines but also circle and ellipse objects.
There are two commands; an enhanced clip tool which provides additional selection options and a special remove clip command to unclipped references back to their original extents.
In the example above a contour and pad layout Xref drawing needs to be clipped to a circular boundary. Using the Multiclip function the Xrefs are selected along with the clipping circle boundary resulting in the layout in figure 2 below.
This utility is a free download from the Autodesk App store and runs with all flavours and versions of AutoCAD from 2018 to 2022.
To download and install the app click here:
https://apps.autodesk.com/ACD/en/Detail/Index?id=3651055987656314133&appLang=en&os=Win32_64
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