From the course: AutoCAD 2020 Essential Training

Isometric views with elliptical arcs - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2020 Essential Training

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Isometric views with elliptical arcs

- Another great piece of functionality in AutoCAD, when you're working with ellipses, is elliptic arcs. And they allow you to generate 2D, isometric views of curved objects very quickly and very easily. We've got a new drawing for you, it's called isometricviews.dwg. And as usual, you can download it from the library to follow along with the video. Now you'll see the two vertical lines there, and they're on the isometric layer. Now all we're going to do first is create an ellipse for the top view of a cylinder. You'll see where we're going to go with this once I go through the ellipse commands. So draw panel on the home tab on the ribbon, click on the ellipse fly-out like you did in the previous video and select axis end as your ellipse type. Coming into the drawing area, we simply specify the axis endpoints of the ellipse here, this end point snaps and left click, and then you come over here and click on this end point snap as well and left click. Now there's our ellipse, and you can see it already starting to take shape as the top face of a cylindrical object in a isometric 2D view. But you can simply right click and select rotation. And this'll now say, what rotation do you want around the major axis. So what you got to think here now is this is a circular isometric view. And you can specify how that circle rotates around that axis you just created. So if you put 60 degrees in, obviously you're working in isometric, it'll be 60 or 30 degrees, and press enter, there's our lovely isometric top face of our cylinder that we're creating. Now the next part of the isometric view will be an elliptic arc. So again, we go back up to the ellipse fly-out on the draw panel and select elliptical arc. Now the good thing is you've got two options here, you can do axis endpoint or, if I right click, I can also specify a center option as if I was doing the center of the ellipse. I'm going to hit escape once there because I want to stay with the axis endpoint option. So again, endpoint snap here this time, and you click on it, left click, and you click on the other endpoint on the other side and left click again. And now, can you see we've got our ellipse there, but we need to specify the rotation. So it's a right click, and rotation again, and 60 degrees again like the top ellipse. Now we need to specify the start angle. Now we need to remember the arcs are counter-clockwise in AutoCAD. So you want to make sure that you're going counter-clockwise and not clockwise. Otherwise you'll get your elliptical arc on the wrong side of the axis. So what we need to do here is start at this endpoint, left click, and as you come around, you'll see your elliptical arc, and you click here, left click, and there's our 2D, isometric view of a cylinder using ellipses and the elliptical arc. Quick and easy, and it's accurate, and it's neat and tidy, and it just gives a great visual perception of that cylinder just using some of the ellipse commands in AutoCAD.

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