1.

Set drawing units

- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now in our AutoCAD Essentials course. And we're
going to be diving a bit deeper now into managing your units and some of those unit options in
your AutoCAD drawings. We've got a new file for you. It's called ManagingFiles.dwg, and you
can see it's a floor plan, you can see the desks, the chairs, the doors, the windows etc. Now
obviously, we're not going to be doing much by way of changing that drawing, but what we're
going to be looking at is the units in the drawing. Now the units themselves can be accessed from
the application menu, if you want to, and go to Drawing Utilities. But there's actually a really
quick way. You just type the word units, simple as that. And you can see on the suggestion menu
there on the dynamic input, there's the units at the top of the list there. So you just select units at
the top of the list, and it will bring up the Drawing Units dialogue box. Now drawing units are
simply a way of displaying the units in your drawing. They are not AutoCAD telling you what
units you're using. You decide that. You have to remember that, and that's the whole idea, is the
drawing unit settings are allowing you to display the units that you're using, if you get my drift?
So the idea is that you can then obviously set units for length and angle, as you can see in the
dialogue box, and also insertion scale. You don't need to worry about Lighting. That's for 3D and
rendering and so on. So when you're measuring in length, what you want to do here is check
what you want to display. So for example, Decimal, regardless of whether it's imperial or metric,
it will display in a decimal fashion. So if you look there, you can see it's 0.00. If I go to
something like Architectural, though, you can see it's in feet and inches. And you decide that.
AutoCAD does not define what units you're using. So for example, if I go to Decimal because
this particular drawing is in millimeters, what you would normally do is decide on some sort of
precision. Now you'll notice it can go up to eight decimal places. AutoCAD in the background
with your CPU goes up to 20 decimal places, so it's a fairly accurate product. But obviously, this
displays those coordinates and units on your drawing, so you don't want to go to eight decimal
places, for example, when you're working in millimeters. You might want to do that if you're
working in something much, much finer and much, much more accurate. But a rough rule of
thumb, if you're working in, say, inches or millimeters, you kind of want to go for the one or the
two. I'm going to go for two. And then when it comes to angles, you can set different types of
angle measurements. So you can have degrees, minutes, and seconds. You can also have
gradients or radians, which are all to do with pi, 3.14. Or you can have Surveyors Units, which
relate to the points of the compass when you're surveying. So you can go for a nice, simple
Decimal Degrees like so. Now you'll notice I've gone for four decimal places as a precision for
Decimal Degrees. You don't have to do that. However, it's important as a rule of thumb that you
double here what you've got here. So if I had one decimal place there, you might need two
decimal places there. And the whole idea of this is that it just gives you that little bit of extra
precision on your angles should you need it. If you are working in millimeters, you want to make
sure that any units that are inserted, such as blocks, come in at the appropriate units when you're
scaling the inserted content. So you've set everything up. You've set your length, your angle,
your units there. You want to check your direction. Now by default, East is zero degrees, North
is 90, and so on. But you can change that direction control if you wish. You don't have to. You
can leave at the default of East. I'm going to do that and click on OK, click on OK again, and you
have now set up your units in your AutoCAD drawing. It's that easy.
2.

Convert drawing units

- [Narrator] In the previous video, we discussed how to manage our units by way of displaying
the units, using the units command. What happens if you want to convert an existing drawing,
that's using a particular unit of measurement to a different unit of measurement? We're going to
look at that in the converting units dot DWG file, which you can download from the library, as
usual, to follow along with the video. Now, this particular drawing is in imperial units. How do
we know this? How can you check? Well, you can go down to the coordinate read out, on the
status bar. That is reading in imperial units, feet and inches. I can also go to the home tab on the
ribbon, go to the utilities panel, click on the flyout here, and use the distance command. And
using my object snap, so I can click there, and click there using the endpoints snaps at each end.
And it tells me that, that is four feet, and zero inches. I'll just exit the distance command there.
Now, if I also type units, like we did in the previous video, and press enter. You can see the
display of my length here, is architectural, and it is feet and inches. So, I'll just cancel that. So
there's ways and means of sanity checking what units you are using in your AutoCad drawing.
But you want to convert this. You want to make this bigger and millimeters because you need to
convert it by a certain conversion factor. Now, that conversion factor, if you're going from
imperial units, say inches, to your millimeters, is 25.4. Because there are 25.4 millimeters in an
inch. So you need to make it 25.4 times bigger. So we're going to use the scale commands. So I
select the rectangle, and all you've got to do now is right click, and scale is on the shortcut menu.
So there's scale. And, you now need to select your base point. So there's your base point there.
You can use the endpoint there, either one will work. The bottom left tends to be better, so I click
there like so. Now, you need to put in the appropriate scale factor. It will prompt you for that, if
you move the mouse a little bit. And, just put in 25.4. And press enter. You will now have a
much, much bigger rectangle because it's 25.4 times bigger. So you might want to double click
on the wheel to zoom extends, and then roll back on the wheel a couple of notches. Now, if we
go back to that distance command, in the utilities panel, what you'll find is it looks a bit weird,
the measurement. So, if I click there, it's now 107 feet and 7 1/4 inches. Now, that's not the right
measurement. But, if I exit that, and I go to my units now and press enter. What I want to do now
is change this to decimal, like so. And I'm going to leave it at say, two decimal places. You can
choose whichever you want there, it's entirely up to you. And I'll okay that. And now, when I go
back to the utilities panel, and go back to the distance command. You'll find that this
measurement is very very different. Just make sure you get that end point snap to that end point
snap there. And you can see its 1219.2. So what you've done there is you've converted that now,
to millimeters. If you think about it, four feet roughly speaking, is three hundred millimeters. So
four times three hundred is 1200. So, with the conversion factor, with the 25.4, what you've done
now is you've converted that rectangle from feet and inches to millimeters, using a conversion
factor. So it can be done. And there are other conversion factors you can consider. If you had a
drawing in meters, If you wanted to convert that to millimeters, your conversion factor, your
scale factor, will be a thousand. Because there's a thousand millimeters in a meter, and so on and
so forth. One of the best sources of information for this is Google. Just go onto Google, and type
in conversion factors for AutoCAD, and you will find that there's lots and lots of different
websites that provide you with lists of all these conversion factors, from one unit to another. But
that's how you convert your units in your AutoCAD drawings.
3.Edit and manage options
- [Instructor] We're staying in the ConvertingUnits.dwg file, and you might want to consider
some other settings that you might need to change when you're converting units as well. So in
the previous video, we scaled the rectangle from inches to millimeters using that scale factor of
25.4. We then reset our unit settings to display a decimal set of units, so when we measured
anything, it was measuring in decimal and displaying our metric millimeters units that we scaled
up to. So what you need to do now is just check some other settings to make sure that
everything's consistent. One of those is your annotation scale in your model tab. You'll notice
bottom right on the screen here, we've got quarter of an inch to one foot. Now that's not an
annotation scale you would use in a metric millimeters drawing. So you would click on the arrow
here and select a metric annotation scale, say 1:1, for example. So you've clicked on that, and
now that's displaying how it should, but if I click on it again, you'll see that we've still got all of
the imperial annotation scales there. Just slide down the slider bar and select Custom, and you'll
see that there's a Reset button in the Edit Drawing Scales dialog box. If you click on Reset, you
then can choose whether you want to display Metric scales, Imperial scales or Metric and
imperial scales. We just want metric. It's a metric drawing now, so we go Metric scales, click on
OK, and if you now click on the arrow, all you've got are your metric annotation scales, which
basically makes sure that only metric information will be used. Just hit Escape there to deselect
the annotation scale list there that pops up on the screen. Now you might want to change some
other settings as well, and that would be in your AutoCAD options. You can access the options
by way of the application menu, the big red A, top left corner of the screen, or you can access
them in a much quicker way. Just make sure you've got nothing selected and no commands
running. Right click, and on your shortcut menu, you can select Options. That brings up the
Options dialog box. Now, there's a lot of information in here, and a lot of it you won't ever need
to change. But you can go through and select your File locations, your Display settings, your
Open and Save settings. You'll notice there, I'm always saving back as a 2013 dwg. That's one of
the first things I always change in AutoCAD. I always save back to 2013 because it means any
version of AutoCAD, from 2013 up to the latest version, can read my dwg files. It's a useful one
to set. Another one that's useful is your Automatic save, 10 minutes between saves. That's a
useful one. Don't go anything less than 10 minutes. It gets a little bit annoying otherwise. But if
we work our way through to Plot and Publish and System, there's various settings in here, some
of which are units related, some of which aren't. But User Preferences is a good one. Insertion
scale... You'll notice here at the moment that our insertion scale is set to inches and inches. Now,
if we're working in metric millimeters, the change that you'll want to make there is that your
source content should be millimeters, and your target content should also be millimeters. But it
maybe that you're bringing in imperial blocks into a metric millimeters drawing. If that's the
case, your source content might be inches for example, and if you do that, when you bring an
imperial block into your metric millimeters drawing, AutoCAD will change the insertion scale to
that 25.4 that we've been using to scale up the rectangle in the drawing. Also, Drafting settings,
AutoTrack settings, if you're working in 3D Modeling, and also your Selection. You might want
to change what grips you show. You might want to change the colors of the grips and so on. So
all of these settings can be changed, and then you just click on OK, and they're all set in
AutoCAD for you. So not only are you converting units. You need to also make sure that things
like your annotation scale and your AutoCAD options reflect that unit conversion in your new
drawing.
4. Work with templates (DWT)

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- [Instructor] We're staying in our ConvertingUnits.dwg file and, as you can see, the rectangle is
still there. We've got our coordinate settings on the status bar now set to metric. We've our
annotation scale all now set to metric as well. We've been into the options and set whatever
settings we need to set in there that reflect our metric drawing status. Now, it may be you want to
save this particular drawing with all its settings as a template file to create other new drawings.
Now, a normal CAD practice, if that's the case, is to remove any drawing objects from the model
space. So, what you would do here is you would, obviously, delete the rectangle. I hit delete after
selecting the rectangle and that's gone. What you might want to do is double-click on the wheel,
just to do a zoom extents there, just to make sure that everything is zoomed out to an appropriate
place when you open up a new drawing from the template. We've got our units set, our layers are
all in place that we want here as well in the Layer dropdown, so what we need to do now is do a
Save As. We want to save it as a DWT file. Quickest way to do this it to go up to the Quick
Access toolbar, click on Save As. As soon as I do that, it defaults to trying to save as a DWG.
You'll notice here that we've got DWG and converting units and it's trying to save it with the
same file name. I'm going to to change the Files of type to DWT, so there's our AutoCAD
drawing template. I click there like so and you'll find now that you're in that Template folder, the
default Template folder for AutoCAD. Now, what I'm going to do is save it there. You can save
it wherever you want to, but I'm going to save it there and you'll see why in a moment. There's a
reason why I'm going to put it in the default Template folder location. You can save your
templates wherever you want to. On your laptop, on your server, on a portable hard drive, it's
entirely up to you. But, there's a really clever reason why I would like you to save it to the
default Template folder in AutoCAD. What we'll do, we'll just call this the ISO Metric Template,
like so. Very very simple naming philosophy there, just purely for training purposes. And then
I'm going to click on Save and you'll find now that AutoCAD is asking you for a description of
your template. Again, I'm going to put in there ISO Metric Template and you'll want to check
that the measurement is correct. It should be metric, so you need to change that to metric to make
sure that this is a metric template because of where we've converted all the units. Also as well,
you might want to consider saving all as unreconciled or reconciled. When you bring in a new
drawing, a new template and it creates a new drawing, you might want to consider that the new
layers on that drawing are either reconciled or unreconciled. If the layer are all reconciled,
AutoCAD won't prompt you about it. It'll just bring the layers into a drawing. Or, if they're
unreconciled, it will prompt you that there are unreconciled layers, new layers that have come in
from another drawing. Just be aware of that. I normally save all layers as unreconciled because
then AutoCAD will prompt you about those new layers, which means that a layer baseline,
which it says there on the Tooltip is not created. A click on OK there and you'll find now, if you
look at the top of the screen, that you've now got ISO Metric Template.dwt, you've got your
template file. It's here as well in the file tab at the top of the screen. Now, the reason I got you to
save it to the default Template folder is when I close this DWT file, like so, it takes me back to
the Start tab. What's really nice now is if I go to Templates here, you will find that if you scroll
down this list, you'll find your ISO Metric Template, or DWT. There it is there. So I click there
like so and it opens up a nice, shiny, new drawing from your template. You'll see there that
you've got your layers, like so. Hit ESC there to lose the Layer dropdown. If you type units and
press Enter, you'll see your units are all set to your metric settings. Everything is set up and
you've got a new drawing ready to go from your metric template.

5.

Rectangles and polygons

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now in our AutoCAD Essentials course, and we're
going to be looking at drawing more objects. And we're just going to dive a bit deeper into some
of the drawing tools that are available in AutoCAD, but we're going to apply it to a more
functional, what I call day-to-day professional, type of drawing. So, you'll notice we have a new
drawing for you. It's called DrawingMoreObjects.dwg, and you'll also notice, if you're in the
Home Tab on the Ribbon, that the current drafting layer is A-LANDSCAPING. Make sure
you're using that layer for your drafting in this particular video. And as usual, you can download
the file from the library to follow along with the video. Now, we're going to have a look at
utilizing Named Views in a drawing. Now, these Named Views are already there. You don't have
to worry about creating them, but it just allows you to navigate your drawing a bit more quickly
and also, we're going to then do some drafting using rectangles and polygons as well. Now,
depends on which version of AutoCAD you're using. If you go to the View Tab in the later
versions of AutoCAD, you'll find there is a Named Views Panel. Now, I can click here and find
my Named Views that way. If not, go to top here, and you'll see Custom Model Views, and
there's an Entrance and a Patio Area. So, either way, select Entrance, and it will zoom you into
the entrance of the building. Now, what I'm going to do is jump back to the Home Tab on the
Ribbon. I'm going to go into the Draw Panel, click on the fly-out, and select Rectangle. Now, I'm
going to draw a rectangle that is going to be a landscaped hard-standing outside the entrance of
the building. Now to do that, just make sure that you've got your objects snaps, and your object
snap-tracking on, and I'm going to select this intersection here. Click, and as I drag down, what
you can see our rectangle taking shape. Now, I'm not too worried about how far down you take
the rectangle, but it must tally up, so I'm hovering over that intersection there, and it tallies up
with the windows. Can you see that? So, you make sure on your polar tracking and your object
snap-tracking that you create a hard-standing, a landscaped hard-standing, and you click like so.
And I've used the object snap-tracking and the polar tracking there to make sure, can you see that
the corners tally up with the windows on the entrance there in the drawing? So, that's our
rectangle drawn quickly and easily on that A-LANDSCAPING layer. Let's utilize our Named
Views again. So, I'm going to go here now, click on the fly-out, Custom Model Views, and I'm
going to go to the patio area. That's the other side of the building, the right-hand side of the
building. Again, we've got some windows here and a door, and what we're going to do is we're
going to create a hexagonal polygon to create like a patio area, sort of a kick-back area outside
the building, and we're going to utilize a really cool setting in the Polygon command. Now, be
aware of your layers. Named Views, by default, save the layer setting oF when the Named View
was created. What you notice about the layer, it's on Viewports. We need to go back here and
find our A-LANDSCAPING layer. So, if we just scroll down the list here, there's A-
LANDSCAPING there. It's actually frozen, you'll notice, so just make sure that you thaw those
layers out and select A-LANDSCAPING. Be careful with that one. When you're using Named
Views, it'll remember the settings of the layers when you created that Named View. When you
go to that Named View, those layer setting will be there. It's called a Layer Snapshot. So, make
sure you're on the A-LANDSCAPING layer again, and that it's thawed out, and it's not frozen.
So, we go to the Draw Panel, click on the fly-out, and you're going to select the Polygon
command. Come into the drawing area, and you need, if it's hexagonal, six sides. So, we type in
6, press Enter. Now, here's a thought. I don't have a center point available for you to select for
the center of your polygon as the dynamic input suggests, but if you look at the command line in
the brackets there, we've got an Edge option. So, you right-click on the shortcut menu, we select
Edge. Now, the first endpoint of the edge is going to be the window here. So, we're going to
come in. See that line there? We want that endpoint or intersection there. Click, and we zoom out
again, and you want to come down here, maybe pan up. Zoom in and get that point just there,
and click again. Now, it's not perfect, and you'll notice it doesn't tally up with the walls. Can you
see that? So, what we might need to do there is change that or possibly move it. Now, my
suggestion would be that you change it, so we simply delete the hexagon we've created 'cause we
need to change that edge value. So, you would come here again, Polygon. It remembers the 6
from the last time, so you've just got to press Enter, and then it's a right-click, Edge, and this
time, use a different corner. And it ties in beautifully, and you've now got your lovely hexagonal
patio area as a kickback area outside your building. So, with the landscaping layer, what you've
done there using a rectangle and a polygon, in this case a hexagon, you've created some hard-
standings outside the building, and you're starting to develop your drawing.
6. Points and donuts

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- [Instructor] We're staying in our DrawingMoreObjects.dwg file, and we're going to be looking
at points and donuts in AutoCAD. Now you may think to yourself, he just mentioned donuts in
AutoCAD. Yes, you can draw donuts in AutoCAD, and they are a donut shaped object with a
hole in the middle, exactly like a donut you might consider consuming while sitting at your desk.
Now, what we're going to do, is we're going to utilize the points first, then we're going to look at
donuts in AutoCAD at well. Just before we do that, make sure you're on the appropriate drafting
layer, so we need to be on our A setting out layer. So we jump up to the layer dropdown, and we
make sure that we've got the A setting out layer as the current drafting layer. Then we need to set
our point style, that's on the home tab on the ribbon, in the utilities panel, and there's point style
there. Four little dots and a paintbrush. Click there, and the point style dialogue box appears.
Now you need to set a point style that is going to be visible. Now the default point style is this
little pixel here, highlighted in the black there. Doesn't really stand out on a drawing that well, so
my suggestion to you is to use this one. Now this particular symbol is the same as the object snap
symbol that you use for node, which is the object snap that snaps to your points when you place
them on your AutoCAD drawings. So the one that I always use, it's my little sort of go to symbol
for points, it's entirely up to you though which one you want to choose. Now, you need to make
sure that you're using the appropriate point size. I always use 5% relative to screen, as shown in
the dialogue box at the moment. If you set the size in absolute units, be aware that when you
zoom in and zoom out, you might not be able to see your points on your AutoCAD drawings. If
you set size relative to screen, and it's always 5% of screen size, no matter when you zoom in or
zoom out, it's always going to be visible. Just a thought there for you if you want to consider it.
So we've selected the point style, we've gone point size 5% relative to screen, click on OK to
close the dialogue box. We're going to zoom in on the entrance hall here, where we placed the
nice rectangular patio for the entrance doors there. And you'll notice there's a door here. And
what we're going to do, we're going to place a little sort of curvy, sort of visibility wall going
across here to hide the hallway area here from the entrance doors. To do that, we need to place
some setting out points, so we're going to do that using the point command in AutoCAD. That's
on the draw panel, here, click on the fly out and just pin it open like we've done in previous
videos. And the multiple points command is here, and it's called point, you can see you can just
type point as the keyboard command if you want to. Now, we're going to create multiple point
objects. I'm going to click on the icon, and coming into the drawing area, I'm going to zoom in a
little bit here so you can really see what's going on, and I'm going to place a point there, click,
and can you see the points going in in that sort of pinky magenta color? And we're going to
create a little sort of curvy wall, so you can see that these are going to be the control points of the
wall, like so, and I'm going to take it to there, like that. And then I just press enter to finish, or so
you might think so, it'll always give you invalid point if you do that, you have to use escape to
get out of the point command. Hit escape a couple of times, it's one of the only commands in
AutoCAD that needs you to do that. Now, it doesn't matter what layer you draw the spline on
that we're going to draw now, so we're going to use the spline here, this one, spline fit, it draws a
spline with fit points, like so. So there's our spline fit, and what we're going to do, we're going to
jump down here to our object snaps here, click on the arrow, and make sure that the node snap is
on. This one here, see the little tick, it's on, click on the arrow like so. And we're just going to
hover, and you'll see that there's the green node object, snap click, and we're going to go to each
one, placing our little curved wall like so, and when we get to this node snap here, we click there,
enter to finish, and there's our curved wall. Now, just before we do anything else, what we need
to do is make sure that this wall is on the appropriate layer. So we go to match properties up here
in the properties panel, and all we do is we select our internal wall line here, and we just convert
that to an internal wall line, and press enter to finish. And if I zoom out now, you can see we've
got that visibility wall curving round, so that when people come in through the entrance, they
can't see all this behind, all they see is the visibility wall. And that might have some graphics on
it, the logo of the company, or anything like that at all. One of the benefits you do have now
though, is obviously the setting out points can be turned off, because they're on their own layer.
They're on the A setting out layer, so you can turn that layer off or freeze it if you need to. We're
going to stay on the A setting out layer for the moment though, because we want to now place
our donut. Zoom and pan to the bottom left corner of the building, to the wall here, and we're
going to type donut, which is D-O-N-U-T, it's the American spelling, not the English spelling of
D-O-U-G-H-N-U-T. So there's the donut command, select it on the suggestion menu, and it will
now say specify inside diameter of donut. Now bear in mind we're working in millimeters here,
so we need to make sure that it's the right size. So I'm going to go for 100 as the inside diameter,
and press enter, and then I'm going to go for 200 for the outside diameter. That will give you a
reasonable sized donut, you can see it there on the crosshair, and all I'm going to do is utilize the
end point snap and left click. And there's my donut, and enter to finish, and that can be a setting
out point perhaps for surveying points and so on. But all I'm doing there is just utilizing the
donut command to show you how it works, and if I zoom out now you can see that that is a
setting out point on the corner of our building. Now, what we might do, is just unpin the draw
panel, that can go back into the ribbon, and we'll change our layer, let's just pop up to layer zero
at the top, make zero the current layer like so, and then if we come back down to our setting out
layer, we might want to freeze that now, and hit escape there, and you can see that the setting out
points have disappeared because the layer's frozen, we've got our visibility wall in place, and
we've also got a setting out point that should we need it we just thaw out the A setting out layer.

7.

Ellipses

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- We're staying in our DrawingMoreObjects.dwg file. We're going to draw some ellipses now
and we're going to utilize the ellipse command to place some elliptical tables in our area in the
entrance hall, so you can see there's some furniture there already, on that sort of orange-y color
layer. Now rather than go and try and work out what layer that is, there's an excellent command
in AutoCAD that allows you just to select an object and make that object's layer current and it's
this icon here in the layers panel in the home tab on the ribbon make current so I select it, select
the object whose layer will become current, I click on one of the bits of furniture, and that
becomes my current layer which is A700-M_FFE. Not that easy to remember so that match layer
command is really quite useful way just make the object layer current. So, we're now on the right
layer, quick and easily done and we need to use the ellipse command now to place some
elliptical tables. So remember we placed our nice curved visibility wall we're going to zoom in to
that area, just between the sofas and the chairs here just here, and I'm going to go to the draw
panel and the ellipse command is here. Click on the fly out, and we're going to use the center
option first, so I click on center, come into the drawing area and it asks for the center of the
ellipse. I'm going to click just there and as you drag outwards can you see if you use your polar
tracking, your basically creating the first axis of your ellipse. Now you need to drag to the left,
like that along your polar tracking line, and type in 1250. And press enter, and that's the first axis
of the ellipse created. You can now move up and down, and create the second axis of your
ellipse. And this ones going to be 650 you need to drag upwards or downwards, down your
vertical polar tracking and type in 6 5 0 and enter, and there's our elliptical table. That's using the
center ellipse command, lets go back up to the ellipse command now, click on the fly out again,
and use the axis end command. Slightly different, we're going to specify the two ends of an axis
first. So, axis endpoint, you can left click there, and as you drag now you're creating the whole of
that horizontal axis. So drag horizontally to the right this time, and we'll put in 1500 and enter.
So that creates a 1500 long horizontal axis and as you can see now, we're looking at the vertical
axis again so you can go vertically upwards or downwards. Either one as long as it's on that polar
tracking line. Type in 500, and press enter and there's our smaller elliptical table, using the axis
end option so there's two options to create ellipses. Center, and axis end and you can see the
differences are very very subtle, but you can utilize them in different ways so we've got our nice
elliptical tables in our entrance area refectory area of our building, using the ellipse command.

8.

Isometric views with elliptical arcs

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- Another great piece of functionality in AutoCAD, when you're working with ellipses, is elliptic
arcs. And they allow you to generate 2D, isometric views of curved objects very quickly and
very easily. We've got a new drawing for you, it's called isometricviews.dwg. And as usual, you
can download it from the library to follow along with the video. Now you'll see the two vertical
lines there, and they're on the isometric layer. Now all we're going to do first is create an ellipse
for the top view of a cylinder. You'll see where we're going to go with this once I go through the
ellipse commands. So draw panel on the home tab on the ribbon, click on the ellipse fly-out like
you did in the previous video and select axis end as your ellipse type. Coming into the drawing
area, we simply specify the axis endpoints of the ellipse here, this end point snaps and left click,
and then you come over here and click on this end point snap as well and left click. Now there's
our ellipse, and you can see it already starting to take shape as the top face of a cylindrical object
in a isometric 2D view. But you can simply right click and select rotation. And this'll now say,
what rotation do you want around the major axis. So what you got to think here now is this is a
circular isometric view. And you can specify how that circle rotates around that axis you just
created. So if you put 60 degrees in, obviously you're working in isometric, it'll be 60 or 30
degrees, and press enter, there's our lovely isometric top face of our cylinder that we're creating.
Now the next part of the isometric view will be an elliptic arc. So again, we go back up to the
ellipse fly-out on the draw panel and select elliptical arc. Now the good thing is you've got two
options here, you can do axis endpoint or, if I right click, I can also specify a center option as if I
was doing the center of the ellipse. I'm going to hit escape once there because I want to stay with
the axis endpoint option. So again, endpoint snap here this time, and you click on it, left click,
and you click on the other endpoint on the other side and left click again. And now, can you see
we've got our ellipse there, but we need to specify the rotation. So it's a right click, and rotation
again, and 60 degrees again like the top ellipse. Now we need to specify the start angle. Now we
need to remember the arcs are counter-clockwise in AutoCAD. So you want to make sure that
you're going counter-clockwise and not clockwise. Otherwise you'll get your elliptical arc on the
wrong side of the axis. So what we need to do here is start at this endpoint, left click, and as you
come around, you'll see your elliptical arc, and you click here, left click, and there's our 2D,
isometric view of a cylinder using ellipses and the elliptical arc. Quick and easy, and it's
accurate, and it's neat and tidy, and it just gives a great visual perception of that cylinder just
using some of the ellipse commands in AutoCAD.

9.

Select objects

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
We're starting what is one of the longer chapters now, in the AutoCAD Essentials course, and it's
all about modifying objects. Now you'll modify objects on a day to day basis using the editing or
modifying commands in AutoCAD. So there's quite a lot to cover in this chapter. But what you'll
find is you'll use these commands a lot more than any other commands on a day to day basis. We
have a new drawing for you, it's called modifyingobjects.dwg, and as usual, you can download
that from the library to follow along with the video. Now what I'd like to do is zoom in on the
entrance hall area of the building in this floor plan. And what you'll see is a whole load of objects
in here including a baby grand piano for you. So you'll see them all there, like so. And what I
want to do is show you how to select these objects effectively in your AutoCAD drawings. So in
AutoCAD normally, you can just click on an object, so if I click on that piano, it's a block, you
can see it's got the one insertion point grip, and it's selected. I can now select a desk and add that
to your selection set. And you can go around clicking on all of these objects, adding them to your
selection set as you go. You'll see a little plus sign there next to your crosshair when you do that
as well. So there's your objects selected in your selection set. You've gone round and clicked on
them. If you hold down the shift key on the keyboard, and then go and click on one of the objects
you've selected, you'll see a minus sign appear next to the crosshair, and it gets deselected. So to
deselect from your selection set, you hold down shift and click on the object, like so. Now, if I
hit escape a couple of times, you'll see that they all deselect, and your selection set is cleared. So
that's a real simple way for you to select objects. You just go and click on them using the
crosshair. Now, there are some other methods of selecting objects in AutoCAD. There is a
crossing selection and a window selection. Let's look at the window selection first. If I start up
here and put my crosshair here, and you do the same, and click, and then drag, you'll see that it
selects only the whole objects in the blue window selection. As you can see, the piano isn't
selected, because it's being crossed by the window selection. So I then left click, and as you can
see, those objects are selected. You can do the same, and then once you've done that, just hit
escape a couple of times to deselect the objects. Now obviously, you can do that any time you
want to on any group of objects. I could do that here, and if you do the same and click here and
drag across like that, you'll see the whole objects inside the window get selected. Anything that is
crossed, and isn't fully in that blue window selection will not get selected. And then just hit
escape a couple of times, to deselect. So, that's a window selection. What happens if you go the
other way? If I position my crosshair here, and I left click and drag upwards to the left, like that,
can you see you have a different selection window. It's green, and it's dashed, but you'll notice
now, the objects within the window and objects that are crossed by the window get selected this
time. So I don't have to fully encompass objects in the crossing selection, like so. So as I go
around here, can you see I've got those objects crossed. The piano, the desk, and the chair aren't
fully encompassed by the window, but they're crossed by the crossing selection. So when you
left click, they get selected as well. Again, you can hit escape just a couple of times to deselect.
Now, that's great, but there's also another weird little selection tool that you can use in
AutoCAD. It's called the lasso, and it's very much like a cowboy using a rope to rope in one of
his cows out on his ranch, kind of idea. And what you do is you left click and hold. So if you left
click and hold and drag, you get this weird and wonderful lasso appear. Now you'll notice it's
green and it's dashed, because I've gone from right to left. So that is a crossing lasso, if you get
my drift. And I can move around, and I can keep going, and then when I release the mouse
button, it selects the objects that are crossed by the crossing lasso. Again, you can hit escape a
couple of times to deselect. If you go from left to right, this way, you'll see you get a blue
window lasso, so to speak. It's like the window selection. So only whole objects will be selected
inside the lasso selection. If I release the mouse button now, and do that, you can see they're both
selected. Again, you can hit escape a couple of times to deselect. So you've got this lasso sort of
option where you left click and hold and drag to select objects as well. It can be switched off in
the options if need be. If you right click, and go to options on the shortcut menu, and go to the
selections tab, the lasso is here. Allow press and drag for lasso, it's just there. So you can switch
it off if you don't want that function in AutoCAD. It's entirely up to you. And then click on OK
to obviously confirm the setting. But that's how you can select objects quickly in AutoCAD to
modify the objects at any given time.

10.

Move and Copy

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- [Instructor] We're staying in our ModifyingObjects.dwg file and we're going to have a look
now at the Move and Copy commands available in AutoCAD that allow you to modify your
objects in your drawings. So we're going to zoom out slightly and you'll see that obviously all of
the objects we were looking at in the previous video are in this entrance hall area of the building.
Now we've got an office area over here, that is going to be occupied with some furniture, and
we're going to utilize Move and Copy to do that. So the trick is to select an object and move it, or
you can select the Move command and then select the object and move it. So if I selected this
desk, by clicking on it, and then did a right click, you can see on the conceptual shortcut menu
that I've got Move and Copy available to me there. I'll just hit Escape a couple of times and
deselect that desk. I can also go up to the Modify Panel here and I've got Move and I've got Copy
there. If I click on say Move there, it now prompts me to select the object. I would then select the
object, right click, specify a base point, and move the object. I'll hit Escape there a couple of
times. So what you can do, is use two different work flows or processes there to move objects.
Funnily enough, those work flow and processes are remarkably similar for the Copy command as
well. So we're going to set up two new small work stations in this office space up here. And what
we're going to do is get you moving and copying objects so that you can set up a little work
station environment in that space. So, let's get you moving the desk first. Now personally, I
prefer the Select Object and right click and Move process, like that. It's entirely up to you, which
way you want to do it. Or you can, like I suggested, go to the Modify Panel here on the Home tab
on the ribbon and use the Move command there that way. It's entirely up to you which work flow
you use. You can select the desk, right click, Move. Now it prompts you for a base point. Now
the trick here is to select a base point that is functional, but more importantly, allows you to
move to a known point elsewhere. So I'm going to suggest that you click on the mid-point there
on the back of the desk. Now we're moving the desk over here; so once you've started moving,
you then roll up on the wheel a few notches, maybe hold down the wheel and pan a little. You
can do that mid-command. Now the idea is that we want the desk here. We're going to move it to
this point here. What I'm going to do now is just click once, and that's now moved and it's in the
office space where you want it to be. Now, you'll notice the desk, you can see the little handles;
it's sitting there, but it's the wrong way around. Don't worry about that at all at the moment. Just
zoom out a little now and you'll see the chair there as well. And you can, because it's a block,
move an object simply by using a grip as well. So you can click on the chair, click on the grip,
and move it that way too. So just move it up near the desk there and click, like so. Hit Escape a
couple of times, just to deselect it. Then you can zoom in so that we're nice and tight and we can
see the desk and the chair just here in this area of the drawing. We're now going to copy the desk
and the chair. So the trick here is to select both, so you click on both of them like that. And
again, it depends on which work flow you want to follow. You can use Copy up here on the
ribbon, or you can just right click and use Copy Selection on the shortcut menu. Again, you need
to specify a base point. Midpoint on the back of the desk will be fine, and we'll just take that
across and you can click there. And you'll notice when you copy, you can go ahead and copy as
many of these as you like. We only need the one copy, so you can just press Enter like that, and
you'll see that you've got those copied and ready to be used. So we've now got two desks, two
chairs, in the space where we want to work, utilizing our Move and our Copy commands in
AutoCAD.
11.

Rotate and Scale

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- Once again we're starting in our modifying objects .dwg file. In the last video, we did the
moving and the copying of the desks, and the chairs. Now you'll notice that the chairs aren't
facing the desks, and vise versa, the desks aren't facing the chairs. So we're going to zoom in a
little bit, so just roll up on the wheel a notch there, so that we can see the chairs and the desks in
more detail. Now we have a choice here, we can rotate the desks, or we can rotate the chairs.
Now I'm going to show you, two quick ways to rotate those desks through a 180 degrees, so
they're sitting underneath the chairs in this plan view. Let's look at the left hand desk first. You
can click on the desk to select it. Now, the trick here is, again, you can use the ribbon workflow,
because, obviously rotate is up here on the ribbon, in the modified panel, or, if right click after
selecting an object, you'll notice that rotate is on the shortcut menu as well. So there's rotate,
again it wants a base point. Now if you think about it, if you're rotating this, and you want a
sensor point to rotate it around, ideally you want to go for somewhere on the chair. So my
suggestion will be the midpoint there, on the back of the chair. So if you click on that midpoint,
and then specify rotation angle of a 180, like so, and press enter, it rotates it beautifully, so the
chair is now facing the desk appropriately. So that's using an angle, now the other tricky little
way of doing this, is if you go down to your polar tracking here, and just click on the arrow next
to it, and just make sure it's set to 90, so it's using increments of 90 degrees. What I'll do now is a
similar workflow, so here, I'll click on the desk, right click, and rotate, like so, and again I'll get
you, to use that midpoint there, on the back of the chair as a base point, and left click. Now if I
move the mouse around, using those increments on the polar tracking, can you see what
happens? It's a really nice feature of Autocad, so that you don't have to worry to much about
angles, if you want exact increments, set your polar tracking to the increments you need, and
when you rotate around that base point, when you see, visually the location you want, you just
left click once. Quick and easy, And it's actually quicker than having to remember the actual
physical angle that you need to type in. Now obviously that's a very very simple example of that,
but, it does make life a little bit quicker, if you use that polar tracking. Now, just zoom out
slightly, just enough, so that you can see, both the office space here, and the entrance hole here,
you'll see there's a little rubber plant there, waiting to be moved up here, into our office space, so
quick and easy, select the plant, and then all you've got to do is click on the grip, and we'll place
it in the corner, say about there, and all you've got to do is left click. Hit escape to deselect it, and
then zoom in so that you can see it. Now I want that to be a bit bigger, I want that to be more of a
feature in the office, so we've got some nice green area in the office. So if you now click on that,
it's a block, and what you can do is you can right click again, and you'll notice you've got the
scale command available to you, on the shortcut menu. Again, scale is also available on the
modify panel, on the ribbon if you want to use that particular workflow. So when I select scale
on the shortcut menu, it prompts for a base point. You can pick somewhere in the middle, in fact
if you want to zoom in real close, and pick an exact point, you can, and left click. And then it
asks for scale factor. I'm going to take this up to 2.5 times, it's original size, like so, and press
enter. And you'll see that's much bigger, and then, you can obviously make this feature of the
office somewhere, click on it, click on the grip, and I'm going to place it over here, near the
window, so that when people come through the door, there's a nice plant and some greenery there
when they come in. You can hit scape to deselect it, and now you've learned how to utilize the
rotate command, and the scale command, to modify your objects in your drawing.

12.

Create and use arrays

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- [Instructor] We're staying in our ModifyingObjects.dwg file, now. And we're going to be
looking at creating a raise. Now, a raise, in AutoCAD, are, in essence, a copy command on
steroids. They're a much bulkier version of the copy command, with a lot more functionality to
allow you to manipulate the objects in your AutoCAD drawings. So, we're going to have a look
at that little office space that you created, with the rather large plant, over here. Zoom in nice and
tight on the office space, so that you can see what you're doing. And what we're going to do now
is actually remove this chair and this desk. So, you click on them, hit the Delete key, and they're
gone. We're also going to tidy up this chair and desk. Zoom in nice and tight. And what we're
going to do, we're going to utilize a few little commands, now, that we've learned already, so that
you can move the chair to the desk. So, select the chair. You click on it, right click, Move. Pick
the midpoint on the front of the chair. And then you move to the midpoint on the front of the
desk. Like so. Then we're going to repeat the Move command. So, it can be a right click, Repeat
Move. Or you can hit the space bar or the Enter key. Select the chair again and Enter to confirm.
The base point, again, will be this midpoint here. So, you click on the midpoint. And then, using
your parallel tracking, just track vertically upwards, and type in 100. Now make sure you don't
drift off like I've just done there. You want to make sure that you've got your parallel tracking in
place, type in 100, as a distance, and Enter. And you'll see now that the chair is nice and centered
on the middle of the desk, with 100 millimeters between the desk and the chair. If you roll back a
few notches on the wheel now, you'll see that that's nicely centered. What we're going to do now
is we're going to move both the chair and the desk again. So, select them both, and you right
click, Move on the shortcut menu, pick a point down here, maybe that endpoint snap there. Click
and move it to a point in the corner, here, and click again, like so. Now, you'll see now that we've
got lots of space available in the office. Now, I've done this deliberately, so that we can create a
Rectangular Array. So, let's go up the the Modify panel now. The array's are here, click on the
flyout and select Rectangular Array. Now, as soon as you do that, it prompts you to select the
objects you're going to array. So, we select the chair and the desk, like so. And press Enter to
confirm. Now, you'll suddenly notice chairs and desks everywhere. So, like, where did they
come from? And it's just the Array command, the Rectangular Array command, going into
default mode. You'll see the Array Creation tab on the ribbon. Now, if you're using older
versions of AutoCAD, much older, I hasten to add, you'll find that the Array commands are on a
dialogue box, which is now known as the Array Classic command. Just so you know. But in
more newer versions of AutoCAD, this is how it works now. And I want, basically, four desks
going along, horizontally, along that wall. So, these ones up here, I don't actually need. So, I only
need one row. So, in the ribbon now, I tell AutoCAD I want one row. Type one in, press Enter.
And you'll see that, as I move into the drawing now, that updates. Now, I've got rather a large
space between those desks. So, that means that I need to change the Column setting here, the
between value. So, what I can do here is I'll alter this to say 2000, 2000 millimeters, because
we're working in a millimeters strength. Press Enter, and you'll find that they tidy up nice and
neatly, like so. You can then close the Array here, like so, on the ribbon. Now be careful when
you're using that Array command, though. Because they are now a group. When you click on
them, they're an array group. They get grouped together, they become associative. And what you
can do there is, if they're all selected like that, you can go to the Home tab and use the Explode
command, in the Modify panel, to explode them. And they then become individual desks and
chairs again. But be aware that you can never get that associativity back. You'd have to go and
use the Group command, over here, if you want to group them together again. So, that's the
Rectangular Array done. Just pan and zoom a little now, back to the entrance hall. Now, you can
see that there's a group of four chairs, all at 45 degrees around a little central table there. I'm
going to remove this one, this one, and this one. I'm just going to delete them. I'm then going to
go up to the Modify panel, click on the flyout and select Polar Array. The object that I want to
Polar Array is this single chair. So, I select it, press Enter. And, now, you can specify the center
point. Which is going to be the intersection of the two green lines. Make sure it is the
intersection, get in nice and tight, there we go, intersection snap. And now, all of a sudden, oh,
hang on, we've got lots of chairs again. That's because we've gone into the default Polar Array
mode. Now, the number of items I want is four. So, again, into the ribbon, change four, and
Enter. That will update accordingly. And you'll see now that I've got those four all at angles, like
so. Now, there's some settings here in the Polar Array that are quite useful, such as Rotate Items.
If I switch that off, you'll find that all the chairs face the same direction, based on the original
chair here. If I switch that back on, they all rotate accordingly, going around the center point of
the Polar Array. I can also change the Direction. So, you'll notice now that it's arraying that way.
If I want to, as well, I can flip the Direction. And I can also change the number of items. If I
change that to, say, five, we should get five in there. And press Enter. That'll give us five chairs
going around the center point, instead. All with equal angles between them. Again, I can then
click on Close Array. And, again, if I zoom out slightly, you'll see that that is associative, as
well. So, I can go to the Home tab, click on Explode, and they then become five individual chairs
again.

13.

Offset and Mirror

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- [Instructor] Once again, we're staying in our ModifyingObjects.dwg file. And you'll notice I've
done a zoom extents by double clicking on the wheel to obviously see the whole of the drawing,
the whole of the floor plan. Now I'd like you to do the same. And just do a quick zoom extents
using the wheel and the mouse. Then, if we have a little look at our new office here where we're
experimenting with desks and space, you can see that we seem to have quite a lot of desks and
chairs in there. So, we're going to to zoom in. So use the wheel, just zoom in nice and tightly on
the office space there. And what we're going to do, we're going to create a short little internal
partition wall to go between the desks. It's going to go between them here. So there's two, either
side. So we need to make sure that we're using the appropriate layer to draw a wall on. So we'll
utilize this icon up here, in the layers panel. Make current. We'll click on one of the wall lines,
and we're now on that layer for the walls. Now the trick here is to just quickly draw a line, offset
the line to the thickness of the wall partition that we need. So we're going to go to the line
command over on the draw panel. That's all in the home tab, I hasten to add. So line command
there, and we need to use the nearest snap coming off of the wall that's running horizontally
below the desks. So just do a shift and a right-click. And we're going to go for the nearest snap,
on the shortcut menu. And pick a point sort of here. Left-click on it, drag upwards, and if you
come out, we're going to type in a value there of 2500, enter, like so. And then, we're going to
come across, like this, and you can see there that we can add bits to it if we want to. Now I don't
want you to do that. I just want you to press enter, like so. Now you'll notice that that layer is
yellow. And yet the walls are like an olive green. Don't worry about that, just match properties.
Select one of the olive green lines, click on this line, and to finish, add it up accordingly. The
reason being, is the individual lines here, these olive green lines, have their own individual
properties set. So you do need to use match properties once in a while. Now zoom in on the area
between the two desks. And what we're going to do, We're going to use the offset command. So
modify panel here, click on offset. And the offset distance, you'll need to type in is 120, and then
enter. Select the line that you've just drawn. Move to the right of it, and you'll see, can you see
you get a preview, either side? So the line you've selected is the blue one, that's highlighted. And
then the offsets, the resulting offset, is the one showing in the layer stroke properties color. When
you go to the right, you'll see the line appear, and you just left-click for direction and enter to
finish the offset command. Using the line command now, just draw a little line going across the
top and point to an endpoint and enter. And remember to match properties, so you select that
line, and then that line, just to make sure the colors are consistent. And then enter to finish. Now
when you zoom out slightly and roll back on the wheel, you can see that we've got a little
partition wall splitting those four desks, two either side. So we can see now, that really, we don't
want these desks in this space. So, select them, very quick and easy. Quick click on each one,
and you can hit the delete key on the keyboard, and we've got that nice little annex there where
we've got the two desks. These are hot desks, so anybody coming into the office on a day-to-day
basis can use them. But what we need is a hot desk reception desk. And we want it the other side
of the partition wall. Zoom in slightly. And we'll utilize the mirror command, just to quickly flip
a mirror croppy, mistake ... Just to quickly flip a mirror copy the other side of the partition wall.
Now the mirror command is not available on the shortcut menu. So the trick here is to select,
obviously the chair, the desk, and then go up to the modify panel and select mirror. It'll then
prompt you for the first point of your mirror line. Select the midpoint snap there on the little end
of the partition wall. Click and drag vertically down, you'll see the polar tracking kick in. As
long as you stay on that polar tracking line with the green dashes, and left-click once, it'll prompt
you now, do you want to erase the source objects? No, I don't. So you select no on the little menu
there. And there's our little hot desk reception desk available. If you roll back on the wheel a
couple of notches, you can now see that we're utilizing the space a bit more effectively in our
new little sort of hot desk office area, in our drawing.
14.

Stretch and Lengthen

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- (Narrator) We're staying in our modifyingobjects.DWG file and we're still experimenting with
our little hot desking area in the office. So we're zoomed in nice and close to the desks and the
nice big plant that we placed to give us a bit of greenery. We're going to zoom in a bit more now,
we're going to utilize the stretch and lengthen commands in AutoCAD to tidy up that little
partition wall that we've got in place there between the two desks here. So this desk here is going
to be used as the reception desk, so the hot des king receptionist will sit there to book out the two
hot desks the other side of the partition. Zoom in a bit closer, so that you can really see this little
partition wall that we've created previously. Now we're going to go to the stretch command on
the modify panel. It's here, it's this one here. So I'm going to click on stretch and come into the
drawing area. Now it's going to prompt me to select the objects that I want to stretch in
AutoCAD. You need to use a crossing selection, don't just run around clicking them. That won't
work, you have to use a crossing selection. So position your little pick box here and you need to
click and drag your little crossing selection like that. So as you can see all three lines that form
the partition wall are highlighted. Then left click again to confirm the selection. We're going to
press enter now to finish that selection off and now we're prompted for a base point on our
stretch command. Now that particular partition wall vertically is 2,500 millimeters long, 2 and a
half meters. We want to shorten that, so that it's 2,000. So we're going to click here on the corner,
use the endpoint snap left click and just drag vertically down like so keep coming down and type
in 500 but can you see you're doing it vertically and the polar trackings kicking in. Make sure
you can see those green dashes of your polar tracking. You can see that polar tracking in left on
all the time, it's extremely useful. Type in 500, and enter and you'll see that, that wall has been
adapted and is now shorter. You can check the length of it as well if you go to the utilities panel
and click on file out there in measure distance. Just using your endpoint snaps just left click
there, left click there you can see it's now 2,000 long where we've stretched it 500 to make it
shorter. So we click exit there to come out of the distance command. We're now going to utilize
the lengthen command. Now this is a lovely little tool, it's on the modify panel, but you click on
the file out here and just pin it open first. And lengthen is just here. So click on lengthen, and
come into the drawing area. It'll prompt you to select an object to measure. Look at the command
line, you've got delta, percent, total or dynamic. These are all different methods of lengthening
objects especially lines in AutoCAD. You want to lengthen it dynamically, so you would then
right click and select dynamic first, and then select the object to change. Now be careful here,
zoom in a bit closer roll up on the wheel a few notches, and you want to aim for the right hand
side of this short line here. So get the pick box there, and you then click and drag this way to the
right make sure your polar tracking is kicking in and you want 1500 millimeters one, five, zero,
zero and then enter. And then it will prompt you to select an object to change again. We haven't
got anymore objects to change, so all your going to do now is press enter again to finish off the
command. You can then unpin the modify panel that will go back into the ribbon roll back a few
notches on the wheel and can you see what we've done there? We've added the edge of another
new piece of partition wall. We're just going to jump to the offset command quickly in the
modify panel now to finish off. Our offset distance it remembers the 120 from last time or type
in 120 if you need to and press enter. And all you've got to do is select this line here move
downwards left click to confirm direction and enter to finish. Now if you just roll back one notch
on the wheel there now you can see we're slowly building a little sort of partitioned off area for
the receptionist of the two hot desks in the hot des king area. And we're going to build that up
over the next few videos. And as you can see that's utilizing now our stretch command and our
lengthen command in our AutoCAD drawing.

15.

Trim and Extend

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- [Lecturer] Once again we're staying in our "ModifyingObjects.dwg" file, and we going to to
have a little look now at trimming and extending some of the lines on our drawing. Just to tidy
things up where we've created our internal wall partitions and also to make sure that things look
neat and tidy on our drawing. There's nothing worse for example looking at a wall like this, and
you've got these two little intersecting lines here. So, "Trim" and "Extend" are located on the
"Modify" panel, on the "Home" tab on the ribbon, and they're up here. So if you click on the fly-
out you can see "Trim" has the scissors and "Extend" has the little arrow. Older versions of
AutoCAD don't have the scissors and the arrow, just so that you know. So we going to go to
"Trim" first, so you click on the "Trim" command, come into the drawing area. Now, you have a
choice with "Trim" and "Extend". With "Trim" you can select your cutting edges and then trim
the objects back to the cutting edges, or you can go for what is known as a dirty trim, where you
use the "Select All" option that you can see on the prompt on the dynamic input at the moment.
Now, first one that we're going to do is with the cutting edges. I'm going to select this line as a
cutting edge and this line as a cutting edge so that you can then trim back those two little
extension lines there, to make the corner of the internal wall look tidy. So, you press "Enter" to
confirm the selection, like so. Then, you select the objects to trim. So, if you hover over them
you'll see you get a little red cross, and then you click, little red cross and then you click, then it's
a "Enter" to finish, job done. You've trimmed that corner nicely. What we'll also do there very,
very quickly is jump to the "Line" command, and quickly draw a little line from end point to end
point and "Enter" to finish, use our "Match Properties" to match the color there, to keep it
consistent and "Enter" to finish. So, we've finished off the end of the little internal partition there
and we've trimmed back the corner. Now what we'll do is we'll do "Trim" again. We'll go back to
the "Modify" panel, click on the fly-out and select "Trim", and you come into the drawing area,
this time just press "Enter", don't worry about selecting any cutting edges, and it will say, "Select
object to trim". So, if we come down here, you'll see that I can trim there, but notice I can trim
anything. As I move around anything that intersects anything I can trim, you'll notice. So just be
careful where you click with this one, it can be somewhat indiscriminate. We want that little
piece there and it's a "left-click" and then an "Enter" to finish, and if you zoom out slightly now
with a couple of notches on the wheel, you can see that that little partition wall looks really neat
and tidy, and that's our little reception area for our hot desk area in the office. We're now going
to have a look at the "Extend" command. If you roll back on the wheel a few more notches, and
then zoom in again, just encompassing all of the office area, you'll notice there's a line here, and
this line here, it says, "Room separation", that's the layer it's on. Now basically what it's trying to
tell you there is, this is a room, and over here is also a room. Now bearing in mind that this is a
hot desk area, they're not going to want to hear all the noise coming out of the entrance hall of
the office. So, the trick is we're going to extend our wall lines here, up to this wall here. Now,
again with the "Extend" command you can have boundary edges, or you can just extend
indiscriminately using the "Select all" option, just like you can with "Trim". In this particular
case we want a boundary edge though, so we go back up to the fly-out and select extend, and our
boundary edge is going to be this line here that forms the wall. Press "Enter" to confirm our
selection and we're going to zoom in now, and just select this line here, you'll see it kind of shoot
off as blue, like that, and this line here, click again, and then "Enter" to finish. When you zoom
out now, you'll see that we have a permanent wall in place. Now, it does need tidying up. So the
first thing we'll do, is we'll zoom in and you can click on that gray line, the separation line, that
one there, and just delete it, we don't need that anymore. Roll back a few notches on the wheel
again to zoom out, so that you can see the wood for the trees. Again we need to trim, and we
need that dirty trim, just quick and easy, so we go up here to the fly-out, and select "Trim" again,
press "Enter", don't worry about cutting edges, and we just need to tidy back to here and just pan
outwards a little bit, and that one there, and that one there, "Enter" to finish, and we've now got
nice little hot-desking area, nicely separated off with an internal wall, away from the loud noise
in the reception entrance hall area there. So you can see how "Trim" and "Extend" are extremely
useful for extending walls and objects, but also trimming back and tidying those corners and
those connections of those walls, within this particular plan drawing.

16.

Break and Join

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- [Man] Once again we're staying in our ModifyObjects.dwg file and we've been working on this
hot desking area in the office, where we've placed the desks and placed the receptionist of the hot
desks desk as well. So, you can see that's all looking nice and tidy, and efficient now, however,
we don't have a door that allows us to go through this wall here into the entrance hall reception
area. So, we're going to have a little look now at the break and join commands available to us in
AutoCAD. Again, you're going to zoom in and get a bit closer to the wall, so that you can see it
more clearly and we need to be looking at this wall here, this line here. Now, the break
commands are available on the Modify Panel on the home tab. But you do need to click on the
flyout, there on the Modify Panel and just pin it open to see them, so, they're here, we've got the
break, which selects the object and then breaks it between two points, and then we've got break
at point as well. So, what we're going to do, is we're going to break our line at a single point, so
we click here break at point, and you're going to select the line, like so, select the object, and
click on it, then it'll ask for the first break point, hover over the line and you'll click now on the
mid point snap. Now, it doesn't actually look any different, but what you have now is a line there
and a line there, you've broken it into two, now the lovely thing about lines, is they have grips at
each end, so if I select this line here and click on the lower grip and then just move upwards,
using the polar tracking and type in 900 and press Enter, I've now cleared a space along that wall
line, which is 900 wide, for a door opening to go out here, into the reception area. I'll just hit
Escape now to deselect that line. Now, we need to make sure that the other line, this one, which
is much longer, obviously has a break space that is 900 as well, so zoom in nice and close, make
sure that you can see what you are doing, so there's our gap there, for the door, and you've got
this line here that needs to be broken at two points. Make sure that you've got your object snaps,
object snaps tracking and polar tracking on, and you'll see what I'm going to do next, is really
rather clever. Go the the Modify Panel and click on this one here, Just Break, and it breaks the
selected object between two points, so we click on break, come into the drawing area, and we're
going to select our object, which is this line here, click on it and it automatically assumes the first
break point will be where you've selected that line. We don't want that to happen, so it's a Right
Click and go to First Point, now you hover over this end point here, and drag across until you get
the intersection and click, we then drag down again, hover over this end point, drag out to the
intersection using the polar tracking and click. And we've got a perfect opening there, for our
door. Let's just zoom back out, couple of notches on the wheel. So, you've got your door space
now, now here's the fun thing about this, often, when you're planning office space, you will find
that, the powers that be, say, we don't want a door there. Now, this has happened to me, many
many times, working in facilities management as a contractor, as a consultant and so on. Now,
I've edited my drawing, nice and neatly and you've got your door opening there, and they say, no,
we don't want you to have a door opening there, and it's like, ah, but I've used break to break
those lines and now I've got to tidy it up, there's a really nice command in AutoCAD that will
allow you to do that and it's called Join. It's this one here and it's on the Modify Panel, on the
little flyout that you've pinned open, so, click on Join, and what you can do, is join objects to
form a single object again. Now, they need to be coplanar, I can't have a vertical line over here
and it joins to this vertical line here, that won't work they have to be coplanar. So if I select this
line and then you come down here and select this line, and then press Enter to confirm, it's now
one line again, so you've got one line again and then we go back to Join, and you can click on
this line and you can click on this line, press Enter again, and it's joined again. It's a nice, quick,
easy way of joining two coplanar objects together, works really well, especially, when people tell
you that they don't want a door opening in that wall.

17.

Grips and grip editing

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- [Instructor] We're staying in our Modifying_Objects.dwg file and you'll notice that we've still
got the modify panel pinned open there up on the ribbon. You can just unpin that now, and that'll
go nicely back into the ribbon. Now what we're going to have a look at is grips and grip editing.
Double click on the wheel to zoom extents on the drawing so that you can see the whole of the
floor plan. And then you can zoom in down here on the hallway reception area, and were going
to look at these blocks that are sitting in the hallway reception area. They're not really that tidy at
the moment. And what we'd like to do is make it a bit more of a welcoming environment for
people that come in through these double doors here at the bottom of the drawing. So zoom out
slightly so that you can see all of the entrance hall area like that. Now, the piano itself really
should be possibly the feature here in the reception area. So what we're going to do is click on it,
and click on the grip, and using the grip it's going to come down here. And you can click there
and place it like so, and hit escape to deselect. Now zoom in closer now so that you can see
what's going on. And you can click on the piano again, click on the grip again, but this time
when you right click you get a group of commands that are grip editing only which are stretch,
move, rotate, scale, mirror, base point and copy. Select rotate and you can rotate your piano to
your heart's content. So if I rotate through this angle here, you can see I want it facing the doors
or not facing the doors and so on. Now the benefit you have is I can jump down here to my polar
tracking, quickly change it to the 45 degree increment, and now can you see I can rotate it
through 45 degree angle increments. And I want it facing the door like that. So using the polar
tracking I click once, and there's my rotated piano using grips editing instead of the regular rotate
command. Hit escape to deselect. Now, when I just zoom out a notch on the wheel, you can see
that the sofas need a bit of rotation as does this table need repositioning. The table again you can
click on it and click on the grip, and you can position it in the corner here so that when people
come in there can be magazines and perhaps some PR material for the company on the table
there. Hit escape, job done. So now you've got some features when people come through the
double doors. They see the table with the PR material, they see the piano and they think, "this
looks nice." So, zoom out again slightly more, pan down a little bit more. And we're going to
utilize the grip editing now just to move these. So if I click on this sofa, click on the grid, right
click and select move. I can move it to wherever I want it to go. Going to move it up a little bit,
just there to the right. Hit escape to deselect. And then the same with this sofa, click on it, click
on the grip, right click, move, and we'll move this one up here a little bit as well, like that, and
just hit escape to deselect. Now it's all beginning to look much nicer and much much more
palatial. The last thing we're going to do is utilize the grip edits, do a little rotate again. So I
select this sofa, click on the grip, right click, rotate. Take it round to this 45 degree angle, click
again, hit escape to deselect. And you can do the same with this sofa, you can click on the grip,
right click and rotate, rotate it through this 45 degree angle, hit escape to deselect. So now when
people come into the reception area, there is literally a reception area. You can sit on the sofas,
you can sit around the tables here, you can even dabble on a Baby Grand Piano if you wish.

18.

Boundaries

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- Once again, we're staying in our ModifyingObjects.dwg file, and you can double-click on the
wheel to zoom extents and you can obviously overview what you've done so far. So you'll notice
we've got our hop desk-in area on the right, and we've got our revitalized entrance area with our
little baby grand piano. Now, you'll notice on the bottom left corner of the building there, we've
got a room that is empty, minus the two little columns there. Zoom and pan so that that room is
central on the screen like so. Now I'm going to ignore the two columns for the duration of the
next video. We're going to calculate the area of this room using the boundary command. Now
facilities managers often need to know the usable area of a room so that they can rent the room
out or perhaps work out what furniture and what people are going to into the room economically
for economic use of the room. Now, you will notice there are these weird rectangles around
doors in this particular office. It's got nothing to do with the doors being weird, it's an access
thing. These rectangles indicate how much space needs to be left to gain access to the door, and
also when it comes to the door swing, the access of the door around the door swing as well. So
these rectangles indicate where furniture shouldn't go, for example. Now, the boundary
command will actually calculate the area of this room with the columns and with that door
opening and the rectangle around the door opening for me; it's a really clever command. You'll
find it on the home tab on the ribbon in the draw panel; click on the fly-out here, and select
boundary on the fly-out, and you can then come into the drawing and see the boundary creation
dialogue box. So you can see there we're picking points, islands detection is on. That means it
would find these little columns for me if I needed it to, so leave island detection ticked. The
object type will be a polyline; you can also make it into a region if you wish as well. Regions are
for really if you want to extrude things in a 3D environment; we can just utilize the polyline for
now. Boundaries set, obviously it's in the current viewport, so what we've got to do now is click
on okay. Prompt's just to pick an internal point, so all you've got to do is left click inside the
office area, and that office now is highlighted; you can see the room, the office, it's highlighted
with that blue line. Just press enter to confirm, and there is your boundary. Now I've deliberately
left it on the yellow of the current drafting layer instead of obviously using match properties to
match it to that olive drab color of the existing walls so that it stands out. But we now have a
polyline and a polyline obviously has an area. So if I select the polyline, I'm ignoring the two
columns by the way, and then I right click and go to properties, if I slide down the slider bar
here, there's the area of my polyline. So I've calculated an area using the boundary command. I
can also, if I want to, hit escape, and you can use the list commands, and press enter, and select
the polyline that way, and when you press enter again, you'll see there on the command line
there's the area and the perimeter. If you want to lose that expanded command line, you can just
press the F2 key on the keyboard and it toggles it off again. You'll also notice there's more
information, so it's prompting you to press enter to continue, and that's basically all of the
coordinates of that polyline, all the vertices of the polyline, all the different xy values. So you
can see there how quickly and easily you can calculate an area using the boundary command in
AutoCAD.

19.

Fillet and Chamfer

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
- [Narrator] Once again, we're staying in our ModifyingObjects.dwg file. And you'll notice that
we're still in the same view as we were in the previous video, where we placed a polyline to
calculate the area of that room in the bottom left corner of the floor plan. What we're going to do
now is look at the Fillet and Chamfer commands, and we're going to apply that to some new
boardroom tables that are going to go into that room that is bounded by that yellow polyline. So,
first thing we're going to do is make sure that we're utilizing the correct drafting layer. We're
going to go up to the Layers panel here in the Home tab on the ribbon and select this Make
Current command. I'm then going to click on a piece of furniture over here and you'll see that it
puts me onto the layer that the furniture is on so that I'm placing my new boardroom tables on
the right layer. Then, you can zoom in to the top half of this room here, just do a bit of zooming
and panning, and then I'm going to go to the Draw panel and I'm going to click on the flyout and
select Rectangle there. I'm going to click here, drag upwards to the right, and the size of the
boardroom tables is 3,000, which is millimeters, comma, 1250. Like so, I press enter, and there's
my first boardroom table. I'm going to select the boardroom table and then right-click, Copy
Selection, pick a base point, using polar tracking, click here to get another one, and enter to
finish. So you've now got two boardroom tables. Again, zoom in a little bit more so that they're
nice and big on the screen and you can see what's going on. We're going to look at the Fillet
command first, so there's the Modify panel, it's in the middle there, click on the flyout, and select
Fillet. I'm going to then right-click and Radius, for the fillet radius, which is going to be 200, and
enter. What you can then do is right-click and utilize the Multiple setting on the shortcut menu,
because then you can just go 'round and go, line and line, and there's our first fillet. Line and line,
a second fillet, and work your way around the table, putting a nice fillet radius on each corner,
and then enter to confirm. Now, that Multiple setting allows me to go around and do each corner
in succession. If I hadn't selected multiple, I would have had to gone back to the Fillet command
for each corner, which is very time consuming. However, even just doing what I've just done is
time consuming when you see what I'm going to do next. I'm going to undo what we've just
done. So, there's Undo on the Quick Access Toolbar. Now, what you can do is you can utilize a
really cool Polyline command in the Fillet command. So, I go back up to the Modify panel, click
on the flyout, and select Fillet. Come into the drawing area, right-click, Radius, and set a radius
of 200 again, and press Enter. Now, you can right-click again and select Polyline, select the 2D
polyline, click once, does all the corners for you. And it doesn't matter how many corners it has,
as long as it's a closed polyline, it'll add fillet of that radius to every single intersected corner. It's
a really, really useful feature. So, let's have a look now at a similar workflow, but this time for
the Chamfer command. Same flyout, here, but click on Chamfer, come into the drawing area,
right-click, and select Distance. Now, there's two types of Chamfer: Distance and Angle, and it
you use mEthod here on the shortcut menu, you can jump between the Angle or Distance
method. I'm going to select Distance, and the first chamfer distance will be 200, enter, second
chamfer distance will also be 200, giving me a 45 degree chamfer. So, I can just press Enter to
accept that second distance. Again, you can right-click and select Multiple on the shortcut menu,
and you can go around doing line and then line, and work your way around the corners like so.
Now, obviously, this is time consuming and laborious and somewhat mundane, and you'll see
there that when I press Enter, I'm done. Imagine if you had 15 corners to do, though. Click click,
click click; takes a long time. So again, if I undo that, and again, go back to Chamfer here on the
flyout, right-click, Distance, and put in 200, enter, 200, enter. And then all I've got to do is right-
click and go to Polyline on the Shortcut menu, select the Polyline, and it does all the corners for
me. If I zoom out, you can see how quick and easy it is to utilize Fillet and Chamfer when you're
working with closed polylines.