Rectangles and polygons - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now and we're going to start thinking about drawing more objects in our AutoCAD drawings. For that reason, we have a new drawing for you in the library. It's called DrawingMoreObjects.dwg. Just make sure you download it from the library to follow along with some of the videos in this particular chapter. Now, in the introduction to this course, I did mention the Learning AutoCAD course that is also available in the library. In the Learning AutoCAD course I take you through some of the basic drawing methodologies available to you in AutoCAD. So what we're going to look at now is drawing more objects on top of that as well. So in this particular video we're going to look at some rectangles and polygons. Now we do cover that in Learning AutoCAD as well, but I'm going to show you some neat little tricks in a live working environment creating rectangles and polygons. So we're in our DrawingMoreObjects.dwg file. Go to the Home tab on the ribbon and what we're going to do, we're going to go into the Layer Properties here, like so. Click on Layer Properties and what we're going to do, we're going to click on New Layer here. Now you'll notice the current layer is A-700-M_FFE. That is the furniture layer for this drawing. We're going to create a new layer and we're just going to call it FURNITURE. So put it in caps, F-U-R-N-I-T-U-R-E like that, and just press Enter to confirm. Now we're going to change the color of that layer. So as you can see, there's the FURNITURE layer, our new layer, click on the color box, and I'm going to select this color here, color 30. Click there. You can put just 30 in the color box and click on OK. Just to make sure that your line type is continuous here, so select Continuous when you click on it and OK it and make sure it's using the default lineweight. Again, just click on whatever lineweight is there, scroll up to the top, and select default for now and OK. That's all you need to do. Now we need to make the FURNITURE layer our current drafting layer. So you can double-click on this little sheet of paper icon here, or you can select FURNITRE and click on the green tick there, like so. That will make FURNITURE your current drafting layer. You can see it there in the Layer Properties Manager. If I close the Layer Properties Manager now, you'll see that FURNITURE is the current drafting layer up here in the Layer dropdown as well. All that means is we've created a new layer just to put our new items on as we work through the rectangles and the polygons. Now we're going to create a new table down here in this area here in like the atrium entrance part of our floor plan. So you want to zoom in, maybe pan up a little bit, holding down on the wheel to pan, like so. Now I mentioned the Learning AutoCAD course previously. The Learning AutoCAD course also teaches you how to zoom and pan effectively as well. I'm showing you here, but again, just bear in mind that some of the methodologies are in the Learning AutoCAD course to get you up to speed, but to pan you just hold down the wheel, move the mouse, like so, zooming up and down on the wheel, like so. Now I'm in this area here and I want to create a new table. So I'm going to use the Rectangle command. I'm going to come up to the Draw panel on the Home tab on the ribbon, click on the flyout here and select Rectangle, and come into the drawing area. Now, one of the quickest ways to draw a rectangle is to pick a point, drag, perhaps put some dimensions in the boxes there so we've got 3680 and 1530. If I click, it'll follow those dimensions for my rectangle. I'm actually going to Undo that now and I'm going to show you a really neat rectangle that you can come up with in the Rectangle command. So I'm going to go back up here to the flyout and select Rectangle and come into the drawing area. And I'm going to pick my corner point, say there, and click once, like so. And as you can see, I can drag and I can pick another point to create the rectangle. Now, as soon as I've picked that first point I've got some options available to me down on the command line. I can specify the area of my rectangle. I can specify the dimensions of my rectangle. I can specify the rotation of my rectangle. Now, if I right-click, they come up on the shortcut menu as well because it's context sensitive. I'd like you to select Dimensions. Now it prompts you now for the length of the rectangle. Now the length is in the X-direction horizontal. So what we're going to do there is we're going to type in a value of 1500 and press Enter. Then it'll ask for the width of the rectangle. I'm going to say that that's going to be 3500 and Enter. Now, as soon as I do that, it'll place a rectangle with those dimensions for me. You'll notice there, 3500 and 1500. Now the 1500 is the length in the X-direction, horizontally. The 3500 is the width in the Y-direction, vertically. Here's the trick though. Because I've specified my dimensions, I can now move around and place that rectangle anywhere around the origin point of the rectangle. Can you see that? So I can take it through any quadrant I want to. And when you're happy with the positioning, it's just a left-click on the mouse, like so. So I've got my new table available to me and you can see there it's all nicely set up in the atrium area. Now you'll remember, in the previous chapter, we did actually bring a chair in. If I just pan a little bit here, there's a chair there. I'm going to select that chair, click on the grip because it's a block and just pop it down here. Maybe pan a little bit. And we'll zoom in nice and tight. And there's my chair. Just position it at the bottom of the table there. Hit escape a couple of times and you've now got a chair to go with your table in your atrium area. So that's great. We've set up a rectangle using a different method using the dimensions method. Let's just pan down a little bit now, and as you do so, if I come out a bit as well, just zoom out, there's some stairs there going up to the next floor. Can you see that? In the center of our floor plan. And you'll recognize them with the arrow that says UP. Now I'd like you to zoom and pan here, to this point here. So again, just using the wheel on the mouse, up and down to zoom in, and holding pan like so, holding the wheel down, you can pan and zoom as well. Now the trick here is we want to place on our FURNITURE layer, a marker to show that we don't want any furniture placed at the bottom of the stairs. So we're going to utilize the polygon command to do that. I'm going to go to the Draw panel, click on the flyout where the Rectangle is, and select Polygon. Going to come into the drawing area, number of sides is going to be four sides. I want a four-sided polygon. So that'll be a square or a rectangle. Press Enter to confirm. Now, I've got a choice here where I can specify the edge of a polygon. I don't have to specify the center. I can specify the edge, one side of the polygon. So if I right-click now and select Edge, like so, and using my object snaps, snap to one end of the stair there, to the other end of the stair there, I've now got an area on the FURNITURE layer that says, "Hey, I don't want furniture there." So if I now zoom out slightly rolling back on the wheel, can you see we've got a nice square area there showing that we don't want furniture in that area 'cause it will block the stairs. Similar to what these door blocks have. Can you see, we've got a funny-shape door block? The squares on there indicate where we don't want furniture 'cause it will affect the entrance and egress into the door, but also don't forget the door swing as well needs to be contained in this particular area here. So the door blocks, as you can see, already mark out where they don't want any furniture. So that's another use of the polygon command there. Now, obviously like we did in Learning AutoCAD, you can just create, let's say an eight-sided polygon, and we could have an octagonal table here as well. So let's go up to Polygon again. And this time we want eight sides and we'll pick a center of the polygon, like so, and I'm going to go for Circumscribed about circle. So that means going from the radius out to the midpoint of a side. Can you see that? So if I use my polar tracking now, I can just drag vertically upwards. And what I'll do is I'll say I want that to be 750 radius of the circle that forms this particular polygon. And there's my little octagonal table there available to me as well. So we've utilized the Rectangle command to create a new type of rectangle using the dimension setting. We've also created a four-sided polygon on the stairs, just up there near the top of the drawing. And we've also used a regular polygon, an octagon, like so, to create an octagonal table in the entrance area as well. So you can see how quick and easy it is to utilize the Rectangle command and the Polygon command to add geometry and draw more objects in your drawing.