From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

Rectangles and polygons - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

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Rectangles and polygons

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- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now, and we're going to take a look at some further drafting techniques that you can use in AutoCAD. Now, we've got another drawing for you for this particular chapter. It's called GND Floor Plan_REV2, revision two. So you'll see the title of the file at the top of the screen there. GND Floor Plan_REV2.DWG. Make sure you download this particular version of the drawing to follow along with the videos. When you open up the drawing, just make sure you're in the Model tab and that you've zoomed extents, so that you've got a view like the one you can see on your screen. Now, make sure you are using the furniture layer. There's our little flyout there, on the Layers panel on the Home tab on the ribbon, and you want to be using A-700-M_FFE, that particular layer there. Now, you'll remember, in the previous chapter we placed this landscaped area, didn't we? On the right-hand side of the building. We're going to zoom in on that now and just pan a little bit, get it roughly central on screen, like that. And we're going to place some outdoor furniture for the staff to use in the landscaped area when the weather's good. So we'll put some tables in. Now, I'm going to use the Rectangle command for the first table, and I'm going to place it up here, just near the door, so people can come out of the door, grab a seat at the table, have their lunch, have a meeting, even just sit and relax for a coffee break or a lunch break. So we go up to the Draw panel here on the Home tab on the ribbon, and there's a little flyout just there. You've got Rectangle or Polygon. Select Rectangle and come into the drawing area. Now, we've used the Rectangle command before. I'm going to show you a couple of little methods of using it slightly differently. So, first corner point. Going to pick a point near the door. About there, and left-click. So as you drag upwards to the right, you can see, obviously, you've got the distances, the vertical and horizontal distances, the sizes of your rectangle. Now, previously we used direct distance entry, didn't we? And then we just tabbed between each distance for our rectangle. This time I'm going to use a relative coordinate. So I type @, like so, and can you see the input method changes on the dynamic input? So we're going @, and we want 3500 comma, type comma as if you're writing the coordinate down, and then 2000, like that. So what that means is, we're going to go from the first point of the rectangle that we clicked, and then we're going to go 3,500 to the right along the x-axis, and then 2,000 upwards on the y-axis. When I press Enter, you'll see that rectangle looks remarkably similar to other rectangles we've created, other tables. Now, you can do a quick sanity check there, as well. So, staying in the Home tab on the ribbon, we can go to the Measure tool on the Utilities panel there, select Distance on the flyout, and you can measure. Endpoint, click; endpoint, click. That's 3,500. Select Distance again on the menu, click on it, and go endpoint, click; endpoint, click. And you can see that it's 3,500 by 2,000. When you want to come out of the Distance command, just click on eXit at the bottom of the menu there. So that's another way of placing a rectangle. You start with the first point, and then give a relative coordinate of the second point, and AutoCAD then calculates the sizes of the rectangle for you. Now select that rectangle again. Click on it, right-click, and Erase it. Now we're going to draw the same size rectangle, but we're going to use a slightly different method which is quite clever. So we're going to jump to the Rectangle command again. Now, a little trick I'm going to show you is if you right-click anywhere and go to Recent Input on your shortcut menu, there's your Rectangle command. So any recent commands that you've used appear in that list. So just right-click, Recent Input, RECTANG. There we go. Now, it's asking us to specify the first corner point. I'm going to left-click about there, near the door again, like I did previously. And there's my rectangle, waiting to be placed. Now, you'll notice, down on the command line at the bottom of the screen, I can specify an Area, Dimensions, or Rotation as well. So if I right-click, those input methods obviously appear on the shortcut menu as well. Select Dimensions, and you'll notice now that you're prompt for the length of the rectangle. Now, that is the x-axis distance. So that's going to be your 3500. Press Enter. And you then want the width of your rectangle, that is the y distance. That will be 2000. And press Enter again, and there's your rectangle. Now, notice it's kind of waiting for another input. And that other input is that you can now rotate the rectangle around the original origin point, the point that you clicked. So you can go in each quadrant around. Can you see it rotating, as if that point is the zero-zero of your rectangle. So when you've got the position you want it to be in, which is going to be there near the door, just left-click and it places it at the appropriate location. So if you've got a rectangle that you need to place, and you know the size of the rectangle, but you're not sure which rotation you want to put it in, which orientation, use that Dimensions tool. Incredibly useful. Okay, we're going to jump to the Draw panel again. Go to the Circle command this time, and select Center, Radius. We're going to come over here to the top right area of the landscaped area. Pick a point about there, left-click, and just drag outwards, and type in a radius of 1700. 1700, and press Enter to confirm. Just make sure that your circle is inside the green landscaped area. I'm going to show you now how to create an octagonal table using the Polygon command. So what we'll do, we'll zoom in a bit so that we can see what we're doing. That's always useful. And then we're going to go up here to the Draw panel again, click on the flyout here, where you've got Rectangle and Polygon. Select Polygon this time, come into the drawing area, prompts you for the number of sides. Now, here's the thing about AutoCAD. You can have three sides, which is the minimum. You can't have two sides, think about that for a moment, you can't have a two-sided polygon. Doesn't work. Three sides, you can. It's a triangle. So as we go up the number of sides, you can have a maximum as well. So you can go from 3 all the way up to 1024 sides in the Polygon command. Now, I've never used 1,024 sides, and I don't know what the name of it is, you might need to Google that. The maximum I've gone to is 12 sides, which is a dodecahedron. But this time we want an octagonal table. So that's going to be eight sides for our polygon. Press Enter once you've typed in 8, and it'll now ask for the center of the polygon. That's why I placed the circle first. So hover over the edge of your circle, and you should see the center snap appear. Move into the center, and left-click on the center snap. Now, just before we do that, you will need your Object Snaps set like so. Make sure that Center snap is on. Click on the arrow again to lose the menu. You're still in the Polygon command, by the way. So center of polygon, use the center snap. Left-click. Now it gives you two choices when you're using a circle to create a polygon. You can have it inscribed within the circle, or circumscribed about the circle. Quick little memory aid for you here. "Inscribed" has the word "in" in it, so you're in the circle. "Circumscribed" is about the circle, we're going around the edge of the circle. "Circumference" of a circle, "circumscribed," there's the word relationship you can use. So if I go Inscribed and select that on the menu, can you see now, I'm going from the center of the circle out to a vertex on the polygon. So if I just go vertically upwards, utilizing my polar tracking there, I get an intersection there. Left-click. There's my octagonal table, using the inscribed polygon method. Now I'll just go up to Undo, click on Undo once there on the Quick Access toolbar. I can then right-click, Recent Input, there's POLYGON. And then number of sides again. I did an undo, so it won't remember the number of sides. Type in 8, and Enter. Specify center of polygon, same workflow. Touch on the edge of the circle, into the center, left-click on the center snap. I'll select Circumscribed this time, and notice it now goes out from the center to a midpoint on an edge of the polygon. If I come up here, like so, can you see there, at the intersection, it places the polygon differently. That's the orientation I want, so I don't need the circle anymore. So I click on the circle, right-click, Erase the circle. If I zoom out a bit now, I've got a nice rectangular outdoor table and a nice octagonal outdoor table, using the Rectangle command and the Polygon command.

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