From the course: AutoCAD 2016 Essential Training

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Understanding coordinate systems

Understanding coordinate systems

From the course: AutoCAD 2016 Essential Training

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Understanding coordinate systems

- In this video I'll discuss coordinate systems. Coordinate systems are used to measure objects and there are two primary systems that we use in AutoCAD. Cartesian, named after Rene Descartes, the famous enlightenment philosopher and mathematician, and polar. AutoCAD also supports cylindrical and spherical coordinate systems, but these are only used in 3D modeling. We use Cartesian and polar coordinates all the time. In face, they're both opperative when you do something as simple as draw a line. Click the line tool and turn on Dynamic Input down here on the status bar, if it's not already on. What you're seeing here are two numbers representing x and y coordinates. This is the Cartesian system. Rene Descartes came up with this idea that we could represent any point in space as a combination of these two values. X for the horizontal axis, and y for the vertical axis. In AutoCAD we can use Dynamic Input to see those graphically or to type in numbers directly. I'l type in 15 tab, 10 to…

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