Some of you already know I prefer to draft in Capture.  I find it faster to work in native 3D and I find their pricing model is more equitable for the range of lighting people in the world.  But there’s been an important feature missing until the 2024 version of Capture and that is the ability to scale a PDF import.  Well, it’s here and I’ve recently had time to play around with it, so let me show you how to do it.

I’m starting with a PDF from Outer Range S2 that we worked with last year for the Tillerson mansion.

In a new file, go to File>Import Model and navigate to your PDF. 

Select your file, then click Open. 

Capture takes a moment to decode the document, then opens a popup window with the drawing details inside. 

They helpfully include a direction at the bottom, but you want to click and drag with the red icon that looks like two red pieces of paper and then drop it onto your Top view.  Here, Capture gives you a choice of Place Here (where you dropped it in the window) or Place at Original Position.   

Original Position means the origin point or the zero zero crossing.  This is great if you are importing from another drafting software, but not helpful with a PDF since the origin point is always the lower left hand corner.  I chose Place Here.  Close the popup window when complete. Next, zoom in so you can view a measurement in the document. 

The idea here is to take a measurement on the drawing and then tell Capture what that dimension should be.  Then Capture can resize your import to match that size and scale the whole document to match.

Go to Edit>Model>Scale Drawing Unit. 

Now you want to click the first point of your measurement- being careful to zoom in to be as precise as possible, then click on your second point of the measurement.  Then you enter the dimension it’s supposed to be (in my case, 16 feet) and hit enter.  (In the image below, the dimension area is over at the crossing of the vertical and horizontal cross hairs.  I zoomed out on the screen capture so you could see the whole thing.) 

Capture has now rescaled the drawing to match.  Take a moment and check your other measurements with the Distance tool under Library>Built-In>Distance to verify.  Mine worked perfectly. 

An extra cool feature is this PDF has been imported as a series of lines rather than one solid object.  Meaning- you can edit the imported PDF if that helps you.  In this drawing, I would immediately get rid of the title and borders since I’ll want to put in my own.  It’s not a completely perfect process to separate the lines on import, so keep an eye out for strange pairings of lines in your document before you erase.

That’s it for this week.  Hopefully this is as helpful to you as it is to me.  What drafting tips have any of y’all have picked up for Capture?  I’d love to hear them in the comments.

***

Mark LaPierre is a programmer in film and television based out of Albuquerque.  He grew up in live entertainment and has been a designer/programmer for musicals, concert dance, live music, circus and corporate.  Mark is a proud member of IATSE and an ETC Eos trainer.  If you enjoy his content, please consider commenting on the website to appease the Algorithm.