By Shelley Cannady, ASLA, Connoisseur Gardens

The problem: You are designing a large site with complex or large-scale plantings of hundreds of trees and shrubs and don?EUR??,,????'???t wish to manually count them. Or perhaps your office has a preferred plant palette used over and over again in your designs. There is a way in AutoCAD to set up plant (or other) symbols as blocks with invisible attributes that can be automatically counted and extracted to a MS Excel spreadsheet that can be displayed and modified directly on your AutoCAD drawing. In this 2-part series, I will show this process using the large-scale planting scenario to create a standard plant schedule, but keep in mind that the same process can be applied to creating lighting or electrical plans, irrigation plans, or for cost estimating (if cost attributes are assigned.) Further, if the attributed blocks are created properly your firm will have a block library that can be used over and over again on new projects. Use the following method as a guideline and modify attributes to your firm?EUR??,,????'???s labeling style and table content.

Making the Attributed Blocks

I?EUR??,,????'???ll use a white oak to walk you through the process.

Step 1

Step 1: Make a graphic symbol.

In your AutoCAD site drawing, make or choose an appropriately sized symbol for a large deciduous tree.

Step 2

Step 2: Assign attributes.

I?EUR??,,????'???ll make three attributes for the white oak. The first will be its visible label, which is the item that will be counted automatically. The others are invisible, but will show up later in the automatically extracted table.

• Attribute 1, the tree?EUR??,,????'???s label:
  Draw/Block/Define Attributes
  Mode: constant
  Tag: white-oak (no spaces are allowed in this field)
  Value: WH OAK (this is the label that will show)
  Justification: center
  Text style/size: (pick something you?EUR??,,????'???ve formatted)

Click OK, then click to the center of the tree symbol to place the tag. What you will see at this point is the TAG, not the VALUE, even though the VALUE is what will be displayed later.

Attribute Definition Dialog Box

Note: the TAG for this first attribute is done differently from the following ones, because the extraction process counts by TAGS (not values). The difference is that the TAG here is specific to this one species, rather than a general category, like ?EUR??,,????'??Common Name,?EUR??,,????'?? and this will result in the proper count of white oaks.

• Attribute 2:
  Draw/Block/Define Attributes
  Mode: constant and invisible
  Tag: botanical_name
  Value: Quercus alba
  Justification: (doesn?EUR??,,????'???t matter)
  Text style: (doesn?EUR??,,????'???t matter)
  OK, click to place under the first attribute.

• Attribute 3:
  Draw/Block/Define Attributes
  Mode: constant and invisible
  Tag: size
  Value: 2.5?EUR??,,????'?? cal.
  Justification: (doesn?EUR??,,????'???t matter)
  Text style: (doesn?EUR??,,????'???t matter)
  OK, click to place under the first attribute.

Note: More standard plant schedule attributes could be assigned, like COMMENTS or COST, but for the sake of brevity I won?EUR??,,????'???t add them here. To simplify the process, you could assign each plant just the first attribute to get an accurate count, and then add all the other necessary table information in the Excel spreadsheet later.

Step 3: Turn the symbol with attributes into a block:

Use the BLOCK command. (Or WBLOCK ?EUR??,,????'??? see Block Your Socks Off)

Give it a simple name that you can remember: white oak

Pick the symbol?EUR??,,????'???s center as the insertion point and select the symbol and all its attributes.

Repeat steps 1-3 for all other tree species in your design.

EXAMPLE SITE

Block Your Socks Off!

BLOCK vs. WBLOCK: When you turn a set of objects into a BLOCK, you can only reuse it in the same drawing. By using the command WBLOCK (write block) instead of BLOCK, you create a new .dwg file that can be used in both the current and in other AutoCAD drawings. In this way, you can create symbols libraries that can be used over and over again, increasing drawing efficiency and supporting uniformity in the look of your firm?EUR??,,????'???s products.

Step 4: Using the blocks in the drawing:

• Don?EUR??,,????'???t copy the original ones you made?EUR??,,????'??+if you do, they won?EUR??,,????'???t be counted properly!
• INSERT each tree as a block, then copy the inserted ones for multiple trees.
• ERASE the original.
• Notice that when you insert the tree blocks, they will be displayed with their proper labels:

EXAMPLE SITE WITH MULTIPLE COPIES OF EACH TREE BLOCK

Divide and Conquer!

The Measure and Divide commands can help you insert a large number of the same block at specified intervals.

MEASURE: If your design calls for an allee of oaks planted 30?EUR??,,????'??? apart along a very long driveway, OFFSET the driveway a desired planting distance, then type MEASURE in the command prompt line and follow the command prompts to insert trees at 30?EUR??,,????'??? intervals, using the offset as the measured object.

DIVIDE also similarly inserts blocks at evenly spaced intervals. Decide how many blocks you wish to insert, then specify one more than the desired number, and the blocks are placed at an even interval along the selected object or line.

Note: In both cases, experiment with the aligned/unaligned options to get a feel for how it works, especially along curves or angled lines, as it will affect the angle your symbol is displayed. I recently used the DIVIDE command to place 100 lounge chairs at an even distance from the edge of a curvilinear resort pool and from each other, aligning the front edge of all of them to face the pool, in these simple steps:

• make a chair block and select the center front as its insertion point
• make an offset from the pool on which to align the chairs
• use the DIVIDE command to place them
• erase the offset

Shelley Cannady, ASLA, and her partner own Connoisseur Gardens, a boutique landscape design firm. She has taught periodically for the University of Georgia for several years and was hired as an assistant professor starting this August. She is currently teaching advanced AutoCAD.

Next month, Part 2 of this series will explain extraction of block attributes and working with a spreadsheet linked to your AutoCAD drawing.

?EUR??,,????'??If the attributed blocks are created properly your firm will have a block library that can be used over and over again on new projects.?EUR??,,????'??