The PATTERN command: Circular

- [Instructor] Once again, we're staying in our 18_FurtherCommands.dwg file, I've left it in the same state as it was at the end of the previous video. So a little bit of housekeeping, double-click on the wheel of the mouse just to do a zoom fit so that we can see everything in our DraftSight drawing. We're going to look again now at the Pattern command, but this time, we're going to look at the Pattern Circular command. Now you'll notice in this drawing, we have a nice circle there, using a nice center line style, and we've got a little hexagon there, just on the top quadrant of the circle.

Just pan and then zoom in so that you can see that in more detail, and centralize it on the screen using the zoom and pan on your mouse. Now what we're going to do is we're going to look at the Pattern Circular command this time. So, we go up to the Modify panel, on the Home tab on the ribbon, and we click on the Pattern command again. So this time you'll notice it defaults to circular, because it's the first tab there in the dialog box. So as usual, we click on Specify Entities, like we did with the Pattern Linear, and I'm going to select my little hexagon, just there, and Enter to finish, like so.

Now, the settings for a circular pattern are very different to a linear pattern, so we're going to base the pattern on, and there's different types of patterns. So you've got the Angle Between and the Total Number of Elements, you've got a Fill Angle and the Angle Between Elements, and you've got the Fill Angle, and the Total Number of Elements. So, let's experiment with that first one, Angle Between and Total Number of Elements. So we want the angle between each element, so, if you look at the preview at the moment, the angle between each element is 90 degrees, so there's one at each corner: north, south, east, west.

And the total number is four, so you can see how that works. So what happens now, if I change the angle between, to say 45 degrees, and I Tab, like so. See, it takes it through, and there's 45 degrees between each one, but the fill angle now is 135. If I change that total number to say 12, like that, and then press Tab, can you see it updates? Now here's the benefit: if I change the total number of objects using this method, each time, let's say I went for 16, can you see when I tab it, it updates, and it changes the angle between the elements? Now I really, really like this one, because it allows me to put holes per circular diameter perhaps in a metal plate, so when I'm drilling holes, I can do a nice drawing of that, and I can show all of the angles, and the distances, and so on.

So I'm going to leave this at Base Pattern on Angle Between and Total Number of Elements, the angle between, I don't need to specify, it's the total number of elements that's important, so make sure you put 16 in, and press the Tab key on the keyboard, and you'll see that that angle updates automatically. Now, there are some other important bits that we need to look at: Element base point, Use last entity selected. So, that will be my hexagon.

We're going to orientate the elements about the axis, and what I'm going to do is set an axis point, now this is the important bit, so if I click here, Pick Center Point, I hover on the edge of my circle, you'll see the center point E-Snap kick in, left click. Make sure that you use that center point. Now, if I run a preview of this, you'll see that all my little hexagons now, all 16 of them, go nicely around that circle, and because I'm orientating them to the axis, can you see, they're all lining up nicely with the circle as it goes round? So just like the Pattern Linear, I can press Escape to return to the dialog box, or right click to accept my pattern.

And there we go, that's my circular pattern, all set up and done in my DraftSight drawing.