From the course: AutoCAD 2021 Essential Training

Isometric views with elliptical arcs - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2021 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Isometric views with elliptical arcs

- [Instructor] We're staying with the ellipse theme as per the previous video but we're using a new drawing and what we're going to do is create an isometric view using ellipsis in an AutoCAD drawing. The new drawing is called IsometricViews.dwg and as usual you can download it from the library to follow along with the video. What you'll notice is these two vertical lines there. They're going to basically represent the sides of an isometric 2D cylinder in an AutoCAD drawing and we're going to utilize the Ellipse commands to do this. So what we're going to do is go up to the Draw panel and you'll notice we're on the isometric layer already as all you should be. If you're not, just make sure you're on the isometric layer so that everything matches up in the magenta color. Ellipse command here and we want the Axis End ellipse like so. So I'm going to select Axis End like that. Now it's asking for an axis endpoint of the ellipse, so I'm going to go for the top endpoint here, left-click, and then the top endpoint here, left-click. So now you can see that we can place our ellipse very easily by specifying the other axis. Now we don't specify a distance this time because we're working in isometric, it's either going to be 30 degrees or 60 degrees. And because we're looking directly at the cylinder, it's going to be 60 degrees. So we right click, select Rotation on the shortcut menu and basically give a rotation around the major axis of 60 degrees. Press Enter to finish, and there's our isometric ellipse representing the top of our 2D isometric cylinder. So now we need to place the lower edge of the cylinder. We go back to the Draw panel, click on the Ellipse flyout and we select Elliptical Arc. Same workflow but we go bottom endpoint, left-click, and bottom endpoint, left-click. And as you can see, we've got an ellipse there but it's going to be an elliptical arc. So what we need to do now is specify the rotation first, like we did with the top ellipse, right click, rotation, and 60 degrees, and Enter. And then we need to specify visually where the elliptical arc is going to go. Now remember it's an arc, so it's going counterclockwise so we would need to start over here on the left with a left-click on the bottom of the line again, drag our elliptical arc around counterclockwise, click again, and there's our elliptical arc. And what we've got now is a true representation of a 2D isometric cylinder using ellipsis in our AutoCAD drawing. So very quick and easy, and as you can see, using that rotation of 60 degrees, you've got an exact isometric representation as well, which makes life much, much easier. So that's how you can utilize your elliptical arcs and your ellipsis to create 2D isometric views in your AutoCAD drawings.

Contents