Polygons and rectangles

- [Instructor] Let's look at two other tools that create polylines, namely the rectangle tool and the polygon tool. I'm going to go over to the draw tools, and select rectangle. Right off the bat, I'm given a whole bunch of different options, to change the width, thickness, or the elevation of my rectangle. For right now, I'm just going to go ahead and click my first point and then drag my cursor out, and select my second point. I want to go back in the command, so I'm going to press return and pick my first point. I want to look at all the options that I get, only after I've selected my first point.

These include, an area, specifying the dimensions, like length and width. Or changing the rotation angle of my rectangle. I'm going to type in A for area and press return. I'm going to give this rectangle a size of 50 units for the area. Now AutoCAD needs one side, in order to calculate this rectangle. Either the length or the width. I'm going to go ahead and select length, and give it a length of 15 and press return. AutoCAD has drawn the rectangle after doing all of the math, so I have my rectangle with an area of 50, and one side at 15 units.

Some of the other options that I had were, thickness. Now thickness is a 3D that we're going to ignore for right now. But width, we're already familiar with, from our previous video with polylines. The other options were pretty self-explanatory. Including dimensions, that allow me to specify specific dimensions for the length and the width. Similar to entering the values into the dynamic input fields. And also changing the rotation. Which allows me to rotate the rectangle by an angle that I specify. Keep in mind if you do enter a rotation angle, it becomes the default angle for all future rectangles, until you set it back to zero.

The last tool I want to look at, is the polygon tool. It's found here, underneath of the rectangle tool. The first thing I'm asked is the number of sides I want my polygon to have. I can enter any number from 3 to 1,024. I'm going to enter six. So I can draw a hexagon. Now I'm asked for the center of the polygon. I want to use the center of the circle that I have over here, which has a radius of five. I'm going to type in cen and press return.

This let's AutoCAD know that I'm looking for the center of an object. In this case I'll select the circle, and now I'm asked if I want to inscribe the polygon inside a circle, or circumscribe it about a circle. This may seem a bit odd, but essentially, you're being asked which dimension you know, the distance from the center of the polygon to one of its vertices, or from the center to the midpoint of one of the flat sides. For now, I'm going to choose c for circumscribed, press return. And I'm going to give it the same radius of five, and press return.

So, I want to see what the difference is with the other polygon tool. So I'm going to hit return to get back in the polygon command. I'll hit return to accept six. I'm going to type in cen again to get the center point of my circle, and now I'll select my circle. And this time I'm going to choose inscribed inside a circle. For the radius, I want to use the same exact radius of five, and press return. So, now we can see the difference between circumscribed and inscribed. Both have the same radius, but one is the dimension from the center of the polygon to one of the vertices, and the other is from the center of the polygon, to one of the flat sides.

Using the polyline, rectangle, and polygon tools, we can easily create a multitude of shapes as polylines, and let AutoCAD do all the math for us.