From the course: AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

Using Grid and Snap - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

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Using Grid and Snap

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- [Narrator] We're starting another chapter now in our AutoCad Essentials Course. We're going to be looking at Drawing Accurately. Now, Drawing Accurately is a prerequisite for any AutoCad drawing, but there are many different tools to allow you to draw accurately in AutoCad as well. So, we've got a new drawing for you. It's called drawingaccurately.dwg ... surprise, surprise, and as you can see there, we've got some objects on the drawing that you can work with, and you can download the drawing from the website as usual, and use it to follow along with the videos. Now, we're going to look at various methods of accuracy in AutoCad, and it's really important that you use these tools, because your accuracy in your drawings could affect the construction of a building, the manufacturing of a product, and so on, and so forth. So, it's mega important that you keep your accuracy to the absolute accuracy, if you'll pardon the pun. So, we're going to look at grid and snap first. Now, these are down on the status bar in AutoCad. They're down here. So, there's grid, and there's snap there. Now, you'll notice that snap is already on, but grid isn't, so click on the grid icon, and you'll see your grid appear in your AutoCad drawing. Make sure you're using the new layer, as well, in the layers drop-down there. That way you can distinguish from existing, which is red, and new, which is green. Now, we've got the grid switched on, but there are settings that you can set for the grid and the snap. Come down to the status bar again, and click on the little arrow here for the Flyout menu. You can see you've got polar snap and grid snap. Grid snap is on. Go to snap settings, and you'll see that snap is on, and grid is on, in the drafting settings dialog box. Your snap X and Y spacing is set to 10, and your grid spacing X and Y is also set to 10, with a major line every five. So, you can see that's that dark line there on the grid on the black background. Click on okay. Come into the drawing area, and zoom in on these two lines here. And, as you come in closer, can you see the grid updates? And, the closer you get, the more that grid updates, so you can see what you're doing. So, that's where you've now got this major line every five increments. So, it's really rather useful. Now, the thing is you can actually switch off all of your object snap settings. So, switch off object snap. Switch off object snap tracking. And, switch off polar tracking as well. You don't need any of them if your using grid and snap. Let me show you what I mean. If I go to the line command now in the draw panel, and I come over here, can you see I can snap to any grid point? And, these lines are conveniently set up on the grid for you, so I can go from that point there ... click. And, as I come along, I follow the grid, and when I get to that grid point there, I click again, and I get to that grid point there, and because I'm snapping to the grid each time, you'll see that I'm drawing completely accurately, but without any object snaps. So, I press hence to finish, and I've drawn completely accurately there, as if I was using object snap, but I'm using the grid and the snap instead. Now, if I didn't want to use the grid and the snap, I would need, obviously, to have my object snaps on. But, it you're drawing lots of regular shapes, that you know are going to follow horizontal and vertical lines, it's sometimes more beneficial to use grid and snap like we have just done in an AutoCad drawing.

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