Draw lines and rectangles - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now in our AutoCAD Certified Professional preparation course, and we're going to have a look at drawing objects, how we draw objects in AutoCAD. I've got a new drawing available for you. It's called Lines & Rectangles.dwg, and the name kind of gives it away. We're going to look at drawing lines and rectangles in a blank AutoCAD drawing that you can see on the screen. When you download Lines & Rectangles.dwg from the website, it's an exercise file, you can see it's an empty drawing. The model space is empty right now. The only thing I will ask of you is make sure that you go to the Home tab on the Ribbon. Go to the Layers panel. Click on the dropdown. Just make sure you're using the Object layer as your current drafting layer. We're going to have a look now at drawing lines and rectangles. We're going to go to the Home tab on the Ribbon. We're going to go to the Draw panel here, and click on the Line command there. Now, you'll notice I use the Ribbon a lot. I don't tend to use keyboard input, there. If you're using keyboard input, that's absolutely fine, but it's entirely up to you which user interface you use to obviously draw in AutoCAD. It's prompting me now to specify the first point of my line. That's nice and easy, I'm going to type in 0,0. The coordinates pop up on the dynamic input, there, and I'm going to press Enter. Now it may look like it's off the bottom of the screen. It is, so hold down the wheel on the mouse, move the mouse upwards, and just pan upwards a little, and you'll see that you can see where that line now starts. Now, down on the status bar, make sure that you've got your object snaps on, your object snap tracking on, and your polar tracking on. Make sure your polar tracking is just set to that 45-degree setting, there, so you get multiples of 45 degrees. The default is this one here, 90, but the 45 one just gives you a little bit more flexibility. I'm going to drag vertically upwards like that, and you'll see that I get the 90-degree polar tracking kicking in, with the little green dash line. I type in 20 and press Enter to confirm. That gives me a vertical line. Now, you see it's gone off the top of the screen, there. Again, you can roll back on the wheel a notch or two, hold down the wheel on the mouse, and just zoom out until you get it to the right size. You may need to roll back on the wheel, pan or zoom like so. As you can see, I can now see that nicely on the screen. If I go back one more notch on the wheel, there, I can zoom in and out a little bit more if I need to. You can see there, I can zoom in or zoom out. It's entirely up to you. I'm then going to drag that across to the right, again, using the polar tracking. Type in 10, and press Enter. Come vertically downwards using the polar tracking. Type in 5 and press Enter. Across again, like so. Type in 10 and press Enter. As you can see, just follow my lead, here, vertically upwards again, 5 and Enter. Across to the right again, I'm going to type in 10 and Enter. Going to come vertically down, now, like so, and I'm going to type in 20 and Enter. Now, you'll notice I've got a shape, there, but it's not fully closed. If I pan outwards a little bit, you can see there that I need to take this line to that last point, there. What I could've done there is used object snap tracking, if I wanted to. Or, there's a really nice feature if I'm drawing a continuous group of lines like I have done, where I can just right-click on the mouse, and if I go to Close, that closes the shape. As you can see, I've got the shape in place like so. What I've got there now, obviously, is the ability, now, to draw lines in my model space in AutoCAD. It's that simple, and you notice there I've given you the direct distance entry method using polar tracking. Now, it may be that you need to use coordinates. It may be that you need to use snaps to draw lines, as well. It does depend on what environment in which you're working. But in this particular case, we've obviously used direct distance, and trained that distance value that we typed in each time using our polar tracking to define the direction of the line. What we're going to look at now is drawing some rectangles using our coordinates in AutoCAD. Now, you'll notice when we started drawing the outer shape, the yellow lines, the first point was 0,0. The quickest way to type in coordinates when you're using AutoCAD is to literally type them as coordinates. So, 5,4. 10,7. You can also use negative values, which purely define the direction of the line from one point to another. I'm going to draw some rectangles now, which you can follow my lead on as well. Home tab on the Ribbon again, into the Draw panel. Click on the flyout here, and you want Rectangle. I come into the drawing area. It's asking for the first corner point of your rectangle. Now, in this particular case, that's going to be 2,2. So I type in 2,2 and I press Enter. Just before I press Enter, though, note all the different options on the command line at the bottom of the screen. Once I press Enter, that prompts me for the start point of my rectangle. As I drag upwards to the right, you can see I can size that rectangle in a freehand fashion. Now, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to specify the size of my rectangle. I can do this in two different ways. I can use a relative coordinate, if I wish, or I can actually specify the dimensions, as you can see down there on the command line. In order to specify a relative coordinate, I need the @ symbol, which is normally Shift + 2 on your keyboard. It might not be. Depends on American or English keyboard. But it'll be Shift and something on your keyboard. Look for that @ symbol, the one that you use for your email addresses and things. If I put an @ in there, like that, it appears in the dynamic input. What I'm going to do now is specify the size of my rectangle. Now, what you've got to specify is the X direction followed by the Y direction. In my X direction, I want it to go 6.5, like that, and then press the Comma key, because it's a coordinate. In the Y direction, I want it to go up by 11.5, like that. Basically, I'm going from that first point of the rectangle, the lower left corner, along 6.5, along the X-axis to the right, because it's a positive value, and then I'm coming up the Y-axis, again, up, because it's positive, 11.5 units. When I press Enter now, there's my rectangle nicely placed, like so. That's one way of placing a rectangle. Let's go back now to the Rectangle command. Now, I could go up to the Draw panel, click on the flyout to get Rectangle. I've just drawn a rectangle. I can press Enter or Space Bar to repeat the rectangle command. You can see it on the command line, there. I need to specify another corner point. This time, it's going to be 18,4. There's the coordinates. Enter to confirm, and it appears over here on the right-hand side. You can see there, in my Lines & Rectangles drawing, here, I'm drawing another rectangle now. What I need to do is specify the size of it. This time, I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to specify the dimensions off of the shortcut menu. The length of the rectangle in the X direction will be 8.5, like so. And then the width this time will be 5.5. I type it in like so. I then press Enter. There's my rectangle. Now, be aware that you haven't finished the command yet. I can now rotate that rectangle around the original start point, that original 18,4 coordinate. I'm going to move it up, and basically I'm going for the top right quadrant. Can you see that as I go around? Top right quadrant. Click once on the mouse, and it places your rectangle. Now, what we've done is we've drawn some lines and some rectangles, and now we're ready to move on to the next video.