From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

Using Grid and Snap - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

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Using Grid and Snap

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- [Instructor] In this chapter, we're going to take a look at some of the tools available in AutoCAD to allow you to draw accurately, and we've got a new drawing for that purpose. It's called DrawingAccurately.dwg. Surprise, surprise with the file name, there, but the whole idea of this file, is it's a nice, blank file that we're going to work in. And I'm going to use some very simple examples, to show you how these accuracy tools and precision tools in AutoCAD allow you to draft effectively. So, make sure you've opened up the drawingaccurately.dwg file. Again, download it from the library to follow along with the videos and make sure that you go to the home tab on the ribbon. Go to the lab dropdown here in the last panel and click on the word objects, to make sure that the objects layer is the current drafting layer. It's a nice blue color, so it will allow you to see what's going on, on the screen, a bit more easily. Now, I normally use what is called the dark mode in AutoCAD. That's the gray and the black that you can see on the screen. Now, you can't really see the grid that I'm going to talk about that easily on the darker background, so I'm just going to make one quick change so that you can see what this grid is all about. So, I'm going to right click, go to options, and I'm going to go to display and to colors, here like so. And what I'm going to do, I'm going to go into 2D Model Space, here, and uniform background and change that to a white background, and then click on apply and close, and click on okay for a moment. As you can see, your drawing area in AutoCAD now looks like a mathematics notebook, right, with the little squares that you use when you're doing your maps at school, and that grid can be used as a fantastic drafting aide, 'cause it allows you to draft accurately at regular spacings, so what I'll do now is I'll quickly right click and go back to options. I will go back to the display tab, into colors. I need to go into the 2D Model space here, and I need to go to uniform background, and I'll just restore it to the color it was. Crosshairs also needs to be restored, as does Viewport control, needs to be restored as well. If ever you change your background, you need to reset those three in phase elements. I'll apply and close and okay. And you can see there now, obviously I'm back to my darker colors with my grid on the screen. Now, like I said, we're going to be using Snap and Grid. They're down here on the status bar. They're these two little icons, here. So there's grid, there's snap. Right click on either of them and go to grid or snap settings, depending on which one you've right clicked on. And it will take you to the Snap and Grid tab in the drafting settings dialogue. Now, what we're going to do here, we're going to set some settings so that we can work with our snap and our grid. So make sure Snap On is ticked in the checkbox and the same with Grid On, there as well. You want Equal X and Y spacing. You want that ticked in the checkbox as well. Now, make sure Snap X and Snap Y are set to 50. If they're not, just type it in like I'm showing you now, and then type in 50 there, press tab and the Y spacing will update, accordingly. So, same with grid there. Make sure that, that's 50. Press tab and the Y value will update to 50 as well. I'm setting a major line every five grids, so if you look at the grid behind the dialogue, can you see there's like a thicker grid line every five grid cells, can you see that? So, I'm going to click on OK there now, so that's my Snap and Grid settings in place. Now, we're not going to use any object Snaps, or polar tracking or anything at all. We're just going to use the grid, so polar tracking here. Click on it, turn it off. Object Snap Tracking, click on it, turn it off. You see they go gray instead of blue? Same with your Object Snaps. Turn your object Snaps off, in this particular case, and then I'm going to roll up on the wheel a couple of notches as well, just so we can see the grid a little bit better. Home tab on the ribbon, and then I'm going to click on the line command. Now, the good thing about this, is I can draw things now by snapping to this grid. Can you see the mouse movement has become jerky, and basically the crosshair is trying to snap to each grid line, can you see that? And as a I move from grid to grid, watch. If I go there, can you see 4250? Move to the next one, 4500. Can you see? If I zoom in closer, there's even more grids as well. So, you'll notice there, look, I've got 4000. Go across, that's 4250, 4500 and so on. So I want to zoom in like that, and what I'm going to do, I'm going to click. Doesn't matter which grid you use. Click there, move along 10 grid squares, so you're moving along 500. Left click again. Notice that's accurate to the grid. Click there, 250. I'm coming vertically upwards five squares this time. And each square is 50, remember, I set that in the Snap and Grid settings. So, all I've got to do is move along these grids, and click each time. When I get to there, I can right click and close, and that will close to where I started from, where I was using the line command. So, that's how quick and easy that is, and I know that each of those lines is accurate. So, I know the horizontal lines are 500 long, and I know the vertical lines are 250 long 'cause each grid square is 50 units in this particular drawing. And that's how you use Snap and Grid in AutoCAD. It's that quick, and it's that easy. Just zoom out slightly in preparation for the next video

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