Lines

- [Voiceover] We're now in a new section of our AutoCAD 2017 essentials course, and as you can see, we've got the same drawing open but with a different file name so that you can download it from Lynda.com and obviously, utilize it to follow along with the videos. Now the section we're in is a section called drawing objects, and what we're going to look at in this particular video is drawing lines in AutoCAD 2017. Now, we're going to do a couple of things first though.

We're going to zoom in on the top right corner of the building in the drawing. So you can see there's this door here and there's this door here. We're gonna zoom in on this room here, and I want you to be able to see these two windows, that one there and that one there. So zoom in, and the trick here, get the crosshair in the center of the room, roll up on the wheel a couple of notches like so, and get it centralized using pan like that. Now, the reason that we're going to be working on that particular room is we're going to add an extra wall, and what we're going to be doing is partitioning each of these two rooms into two rooms each so we'll end up with four rooms instead of two.

Now I'm not going to take you into designing all the doors and everything. We're going to utilize the line command to draw the new internal walls. Now you'll notice there's a yellow layer here as well. Now that layer there, you'll notice, is a line, and the layer there is I-WALL. So before we do anything else, go to the home tab on the ribbon, enter the layers panel here, and just check that your current drafting layer is I-WALL. As you can see, mine is there, and all you do is click on the flyout there, scroll down to the words I-WALL, click on it, and that becomes the current layout.

Now, we're going to place two vertical lines that form the internal walls, and then what we're going to do, we're going to utilize the offset command to offset them as well. Now we want to make sure that all internal walls are the same width. So we want to make sure that we are obviously using the same width wall as we have here. Now a little trick: if you don't know what the width of the wall is, zoom in on part of the wall where you can measure it. I'm gonna go over this doorway here like so, and you can just see a little bit of wall there, and we're going to use the measure tool like we have in previous videos.

So I'll go to the utilities panel, measure, click on the flyout there and distance, and just making sure your object snaps are on down on the status bar, you're gonna go that endpoint snap there, left-click, to the endpoint snap there, left-click. So it's 138.5. So that particular wall is 138.5 millimeters wide. I'll just exit the distance command, hit escape a couple of times to cancel any commands that may be open. Now I want to zoom previous now and go back to the zoom I had before.

Utilize the navbar, come down here, click on the flyout. There's zoom previous. It just takes me back, saves me having to mess around with zooming and panning again. Now, I'm going to just draw two lines using the line command, and all I'm going to do is place a line between these two windows up here and these two windows up here, utilizing my object snaps. Now, there's one really neat object snap and it's an override object snap, and I'll show you how to use it in a second, but what we need to do first is obviously utilize the light command.

Now that's on the home tab in the draw panel, and it's right over here. There's the line command there. Click there and come into the drawing area, and once you've clicked on it, you'll notice that you get prompted to specify the first point of the line. Now, this where we utilize that really neat override snap. Just hold down shift on the keyboard, and what you want to do is right-click, and you'll see on the flyout menu that appears, you've got a mid between two points. Select that to snap it there. It doesn't show up anywhere else, and then zoom in on the two windows like so.

Now you just see the wall there, and I want a mid between that point there and that point there, and as soon as I do that, can you see my line starts mid between those two points. Roll back on the wheel now to zoom out and maybe pan upwards a little bit, and then just drag the line down. Now you'll notice it's working at 90 degrees with a polar angle of 270. That's because I've got polar tracking switched on down on the status bar as well. So we're using object snaps and polar tracking, and they're down on the bottom of the screen on the status bar.

As I come down, I get a midpoint there. As soon as you see that midpoint snap, and again, make sure that your object snap are on to get the snaps, and click there like so, and there's your line. Just press enter to finish the line command. Now, I'm mentioned a number of snap tools there that are available to you. When you're running in AutoCAD, here's your object snaps. Click on that arrow there. Make sure that these five snaps are ticked: endpoint, midpoint, center, intersection, and extension. They're the most commonly used snaps that you'll find.

So just make sure that they're available. I just press escape there a couple of times. That doesn't actually close that menu, weirdly enough. You do have to click on the little triangle again. A bit strange, but true, and that's how AutoCAD 17 works. Now the other thing I had switched on was my polar tracking. Now that's this one here, polar tracking, and again, click on the arrow there, and there's the angles there. I normally have it set to increments of 45 degrees here so I can get that 90 degree angle. So again, just click on the triangle there to close it, and those are the settings that you need to use.

Now we'll just repeat that one more time. I'll zoom out a little, pan across, and we'll split this room here, the room to the right. So again, I go to the line command up here, click on the line command, and it asks me to specify the first point. Shift and right-click, and you want the mid between two points. Now that's gone of the screen this time. I'll just hit escape, come down a bit, shift and right-click again, you want mid between two points there. Zoom in and get that point there, endpoint snap, that point there, endpoint snap, and it goes to the mid between two points, and then using the object snap tracking and the polar tracking, you come down here to the midpoint snap, and this time, can you see it getting an intersection because that line is not exactly each way? So you have to line it in and get an intersection with that yellow line there, click, and then just enter to finish the line command, and you've drawn your two lines ready to start developing the internal walls to split those two rooms in two.