Discover how to perfect your AutoCAD drawing skills by learning the essential steps to finish a detail symbol. You will understand how to correctly use the line tool and the object snap to ensure your geometry is perfectly aligned.
Key Insights
- The article provides a tutorial on how to complete a detail symbol in AutoCAD, emphasizing the need to turn off snaps for a better understanding of how AutoCAD draws and connects geometry.
- It demonstrates how to effectively use the line tool by drawing from quadrant to quadrant of a circle and the importance of object snaps in ensuring geometry is perfectly aligned.
- The article suggests practicing the mentioned steps to master the technique, noting that the attributes for the drawing symbol would be dealt with at a later point in the course.
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In this video, we will finish the detail symbol. Now, to understand how AutoCAD draws and connects geometry, I want to go down to my status bar, click all of the buttons that are currently on, and turn the snaps off.
With that done, we can activate our Line tool. We can go to the Home tab in our ribbon, Draw panel, Line tool, and we can see in the command prompt that it says 'Specify, ' which means click or type the first point. I want to draw this line from the furthest left side of the circle to the furthest right side of the circle, and those are known as quadrants.
Here, I will click, then click again, and hit ENTER to end my line. Now, that was close, but it's very obvious that these lines do not match up with the quadrants of the circle. I will use my mouse and scroll wheel to zoom in on this point by rolling my mouse in and out, and I can see very clearly that this is not aligned with my quadrant.
I will hit Undo to undo my zoom, and then Undo again to undo my line. Now, I want to activate the Line tool once again, and this time I will activate my pop-up menu by Shift + right-click, which will show my object snaps. Object snaps are the way that AutoCAD ensures that geometry is perfectly aligned.
In this case, we know we're going from the left quadrant to the right quadrant, so I will Shift + right-click Quadrants. When I hover near the circle, I will see my object snap appear. The quadrant object snap is a diamond shape, and you'll notice that when I lock in my pop-up menu object snap, I do not even need to be that close to the quadrant. However, when I get close to the quadrant, my crosshairs will snap directly into place. When I see that, I will click, and then I need to activate my other quadrant, so I will Shift + right-click again, select Quadrant, and choose the other quadrant.
Now, I'll move my line away to show that I've locked in the second quadrant, and hit ENTER on the keyboard. Press CTRL + S to save.
Feel free to practice by hitting Undo, and one more time, I will use the Line tool.
I need to Shift + right-click and find my quadrant. I'll move my mouse until I see that snap appear. I'll move my mouse, Shift + right-click, and select Quadrant again.
I see my next quadrant. Click, move my mouse to the side, hit ENTER, and press CTRL + S to save.
Once again, we are not going to cover the attributes for this drawing symbol for now.
We will revisit this symbol later in the course.
In the next video, we will work on the detail hat symbol.
