From the course: AutoCAD 2021 Essential Training

Selecting objects - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2021 Essential Training

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Selecting objects

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- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now, in our AutoCAD Essential training course. And what we're going to look at now is modifying objects in our AutoCAD drawings. So we've got a new drawing for you, it's called ModifyingObjects.dwg, and as usual, you can download it to follow along with the videos in this chapter. This is one of the longer chapters in the AutoCAD course, purely because there's a lot of different ways of modifying objects in your AutoCAD drawings. So, what we're going to look at first is how we select objects in our AutoCAD drawings. We're going to zoom in on the entrance hall of the building, the floor plan, and as you can see, there's some objects in the entrance hall that might not normally be there, like a baby grand piano. I just had a little bit of fun bringing in some blocks that we're going to select for this particular exercise. So, you'll notice, on the crosshair, you've got a little box. That is your pickbox, and you'll notice when that pickbox touches an object, and you left-click, it selects the object, like I've just done with the piano. I can select the desk, and as you can see, each time, when I hover, there's a little plus sign, which means I'm adding to my selections set, as I go around, clicking on each of these objects in my AutoCAD drawing. Now, you may be that you get to a point where you don't want one of these objects in your selections set. Let's say the piano, for example. So I can hold down the shift key, and I can click on the piano, but notice the little minus sign, because I've got the shift key held down, you get a minus sign, and you can remove it from the selections set. And I can hold down the shift key, and click on each of the objects with the little minus sign, and as you can see, each one then becomes deselected, until I have no selections set left. Now, there's other ways of selecting multiple objects in your AutoCAD drawings, and, one of the more common ones is the Window Selection and the Crossing Selection method. So if I put my crosshair, say here, and click once, and drag, I'm now performing what they call a Window Selection, and it's blue, and it normally goes from left to right. Now, you'll notice there, that only the objects that are completely encompassed by the blue window are highlighted, and when I perform the second click on the blue selection window, it's only those objects that are selected. So, a Window Selection will only select the whole objects encompassed by the boundary of the window. If I hit escape now, just to deselect, and go from right to left this time, instead of left to right, like I did with the window selection, if I click down here, there's the crosshair, and drag outwards, can you see objects that I'm crossing get highlighted? Unlike with the Window Selection, so as I come up here, you can see now, that I'm crossing the desk, and the two-seater sofa, and when I click, they're still getting selected, so a Crossing Window Selection goes from right to left, it's green and dashed, unlike the blue and continuous line in Window Selection, and it selects objects that are encompassed by the window, and also, crossed by the window. Again, you can just hit escape there, to deselect the objects that you've selected. So, we've got numerous selection methods there already. Now, I'm going to show you another selection method, that's a little bit weird, and a little bit random, and it's in some of the later versions of AutoCAD. So if I now left-click and hold, and go around an object, you'll see this funny shape. That's known as a lasso. And that's a lasso selection method, so if I left-click, drag, and come around the other way, going counter-clockwise, you'll see there that I've got a crossing selection, so I've crossed the object, instead of entirely encompassing the object. So you can have a window lasso selection. And, a crossing lasso selection. And it's a left-click and hold. So, if I just left-click and hold, and drag around, can you see, only the objects encompassed by the lasso, in that case, get selected. If I go the other way, can you see there, I'm crossing that desk with the lasso, and you can see it selects the desk quite happily. I'll just hit escape there just to deselect that now. Now, the lasso selection can be a little bit annoying if you're not used to it, especially if you do that left-click and hold. If you just right-click, and go to Options on your Shortcut Menu, and go to the Selection tab, on the ribbon, there's the lasso setting there, Allow press and drag for Lasso. So you can switch it off, if you wish. I'll leave it on for the purposes of this course, but, if it does get a bit irritating, you can turn it off. So I'll click on OK there, on the options dialogue box. But as you can see, there are numerous methods to select objects when you're modifying your objects in your AutoCAD drawings.

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