AutoCAD

CAD Co-Pilot works in AutoCAD as a drafting assistant: lines, arcs, blocks, xrefs, layers, annotation and drafting symbols, layouts and plotting. AutoCAD is not a feature-based modeller, so this page is as much about what CoPilot does not do here as what it does — and it is specific about both.

Read this first if you are coming from one of the 3D systems. There is no feature tree in a DWG, no parametric sketch, no assembly and no solid modelling on this backend. Requests for them are refused by name rather than approximated, and the refusal usually names the AutoCAD equivalent to use instead.

Versions

Installation and where CoPilot appears

CoPilot installs for AutoCAD as an Autodesk plug-in bundle that loads automatically when AutoCAD starts — there is nothing to enable per session. Your administrator handles this; if the tab is missing after a restart, see Troubleshooting.

You get a ribbon tab called CAD CoPilot with one panel and five buttons:

ButtonCommandWhat it does
MacrosCOPILOTMACROSOpens the macro library in the desktop agent. See Macros.
VariationsCOPILOTVARIATIONSOpens the variations dialog. See Variations.
Stop Connection / Restart ConnectionCOPILOTCONNSTOP / COPILOTCONNRESTARTOne toggle; the caption tells you the current state.
Desktop AgentCOPILOTAGENTOpens the chat. COPILOT does the same.
HelpCOPILOTHELPOpens this documentation.
The chat is not inside AutoCAD. You talk to CoPilot in the desktop agent — the floating balloon, the quick ask bar or the chat card — and it drives your AutoCAD session from there. All five commands work with no drawing open.

AutoCAD gets five ribbon buttons where the 3D systems get nine. The four that are missing — Part from Drawing/PDF/Image, Part from Mesh, Drawing from Reference and Refeature Solid — all produce 3D parts, which this backend cannot do. They are omitted rather than shown and refused.

Units: check this before anything else

A DWG has no inherent units, and AutoCAD's own default template is imperial. CoPilot always talks in millimetres. A drawing it creates starts from acadiso.dwt with INSUNITS set to millimetres. A drawing you opened is converted from whatever INSUNITS says — and if INSUNITS is unset, CoPilot assumes millimetres and says so in every reply (“unitless (assumed mm)”). If you see that and the drawing is really inches, set INSUNITS before going further.

What CoPilot can do in AutoCAD

Drawing and editing 2D geometry

Lines, circles, arcs (by centre and angles, or by three points), ellipses, splines through fit points, rectangles and regular polygons. Move, rotate, copy, mirror, offset, uniform scale, erase, and rectangular or polar arrays.

Draw a 120 x 80 rectangle at (0,0), then offset it 5 mm inwards
Array the Ø8 circle at (20,20) six times at 25 mm spacing along X

Every entity is reported by its AutoCAD handle — the same hexadecimal id AutoCAD itself uses, which survives saving and reopening — so you can refer back to exactly what was created.

Annotation and drafting symbols

Notes as MText, and proper drafting symbols rather than drawn approximations:

Add a flatness 0.05 feature control frame at (60, 40) with a leader to the top edge
CoPilot cannot create dimensions in AutoCAD. It can list, select and re-layer the dimensions that are already in a drawing, but it has no dimension-creation operation here. To add one, have it run AutoCAD's own command — DIMLINEAR, DIMRADIUS and so on — and answer the prompts. This is the one place where the 3D systems are meaningfully ahead; see Drawings & Dimensions for what they do.

Blocks and xrefs

Blocks are AutoCAD's re-use mechanism, and CoPilot treats them as first-class: create a block from selected entities (attributes and nested references carried across), insert a reference from a file or from a definition already in the drawing, and read back the block name, scale, rotation and attribute values.

External references get the full set: attach and overlay, detach, bind, repath, and reload or unload. Listing the drawing's references reports nested xrefs hierarchically, with each one's path and AutoCAD's own load status.

List every xref in this drawing with its path and load state
Repath the FRAME xref to C:\refs\FRAME-rev-C.dwg and reload it
Binding only works on an xref that is currently resolved. An unloaded or missing one is refused by name, with the fix named: reload it, or repath it first. Binding uses bind style, so nothing of the xref is merged over your host layers.

Layers and linetypes

Create a layer with its colour, linetype and current-status in one go; turn layers on and off, freeze, thaw, lock, unlock, delete; read back every layer's colour, linetype, lineweight, transparency, state and how many entities are on it. Linetypes load from the standard pattern files automatically, and everyday names (“dashed”, “dash-dot”, “centre”) are understood.

Create a layer called DIMS, colour 3, linetype CONTINUOUS, and make it current
Move every dimension in the drawing to the DIMS layer
A layer move has to say what it moves. “Move things to layer X” with neither a list of entities nor a kind is refused rather than treated as “everything” — that ambiguity once relocated forty-one entities nobody meant to touch. Name the handles, or name a kind (curves, text, dimensions, blocks, hatches, all).
Notes and symbols land on the current layer, exactly as they do when you draw them yourself. Make the layer you want current before asking for annotation, or it inherits whatever was last set.

Layouts and plotting

Model space and every existing layout are addressable as places to put geometry and annotation — say which one you mean and CoPilot draws there. Export supports PDF (a real plot through the standard PDF plotter), DXF and DWG, and each export is verified on disk afterwards, so a plot that produced no file is reported as a failure rather than a success.

Plot Layout1 to C:\out\sheet1.pdf

Selection, properties and preferences

CoPilot can set AutoCAD's real pick set — and it reads it back, so it only claims a selection that the drawing agrees with. You can select by kind (curves, lines, circles, arcs, polylines, text, dimensions, blocks, hatches, leaders, feature control frames…), by a name substring, or by pattern, and add to, remove from, replace or clear the current selection.

Select every block whose name starts with VALVE-
What is currently selected?

Drawing properties (title, author, revision, and your own custom properties) can be read and written. System variables and the Options tree can both be read and set — and for variables where the number means something, the reply says what it means rather than leaving you to look it up.

What is LUPREC set to, and what does that mean?

Running any AutoCAD command

Whatever is not covered above is still reachable: CoPilot can search a catalogue of AutoCAD's commands — including where each one lives on the ribbon — and run one by name with its option keywords.

Search the AutoCAD commands for anything about hatching, then run HATCH

This is the escape hatch for dimensioning, hatching, PDF import and anything else without a direct operation. See When a Dialog Appears for how CoPilot handles a command that stops and asks.

3D solids that already exist

If your DWG contains 3D solids, CoPilot can inspect and lightly edit them: list their faces with type, outward normal, area, radius and bounding box; push a named face along its normal to add or remove material, with the volume measured before and after; and scale a solid uniformly.

It cannot create them. Extrude, revolve, sweep, loft, boolean, fillet, chamfer, shell, draft, hole and thread are not available in AutoCAD, and there is no STEP, IGES, STL or SAT export. If you need to build a solid, build it in one of the 3D systems.

What is not available in AutoCAD

These are refused by name, with the reason — you will never get a fabricated success:

Macros, variations and the markup board on AutoCAD

Three more things worth knowing

See also