From the course: AutoCAD 2015 Essential Training

Using polar tracking

From the course: AutoCAD 2015 Essential Training

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Using polar tracking

In this video we'll take a look at polar tracking and compare it with ortho. Start by drawing a line, and turn ortho on, down here on the status bar. As the icon suggests, ortho constrains your drawing to orthogonal, 90 degree increments. So if I draw a line here, I can only draw it horizontally or vertically. I can click points here without having to worry about the angle. I can just type in a distance, say 12, and press enter, and AutoCAD will draw it horizontally. If I move the cursor down in this direction and I type: 12 enter. It's going to understand that I want to draw it down because of the location of my cursor. So if I move the cursor over this way and I type twenty, enter. There's no need for my to type in the angle. Because ortho is taking care of that for me. So ortho is used quite a lot. Because most objects that are manufactured have right angles. Most buildings have right angles for the walls. And so this is quite handy. However, there are many situations where you will want objects to meet at something other than a right angle. And you would use polar tracking for that. Let's turn off ortho, and turn on the neighboring icon which is polar tracking. Polar tracking is controlled with this menu, and you have different sets of angles you can snap to. Let's start by selecting this top option. 90, 180, 270, 360, and so on. It's very similar to the way ortho works. Draw a line from some arbitrary point and see what happens here. We have a green dashed line representing the polar tracking. And it works very much like Ortho, I can type in a distance, say ten and press enter. And auto Cad will draw that horizontally. However, I have more flexibility here because I can actually draw a line at any angle that I want. Draw one up here. I can draw one over there. But I can, if I want, snap to this green dashed line. I can draw a line down here that's size units long. I'll type 6 enter. And there's no need for me to type in the angle value. Of course you can override this at any time by typing in values. I could say, ten, angle symbol, 15, to draw a line 10 units long at a 15 degree angle. You can change the set of angles here, to a smaller increment. Let's try 30, 60, 90, 120 and so on. And now I can go ahead and draw, lines with more, choices here for the angle that I'm going to snap to. So depending on what you're drawing, you basically just look at it, and say okay, does this conform to some kind of polar orientation? Like, are there a lot of angles that are 30 degree angles, are they 40 degree angles? And you just choose your right sequence of angles here. You can also set up your own angles if you have. Some odd angles you can add that would be here by clicking view. You can toggle polar tracking on and off with the F-10 key. In the next video, we'll go over the dynamic input system in more detail.

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