Chapter Project

this chapter gave us the tools we need to look at the data in our files let’s start by opening up the ice rink example file here for chapter 7 click open imagine that we were given this autocad drawing by our supervisor so that we can take some measurements on it and help make some construction estimates something that’s very practical and often done so that’s what we’re going to do for this chapter project autocad can be used for more than just drawing things once something is drawn or modeled we can use the CAD to get real life information about things very quickly and we can even perform some calculations we need to know the area of the ice rinks we have three of them here so let’s open up the properties palette press control one to open it up now let’s select the outer shape of the rink and read it off
right here it’s a closed polyline so we can get the area very quickly and instantly right here now this is in square units and for our sake of argument that’s all we care about we don’t really care what those units are just that they’re in some sort of unit so we see here that one area is 17,000 221 square units all three rings it should be the same size well let’s pick them all we still have this one selected if you’ve unselected it go ahead and pick it select the second drink and now the third ring
and now we see that the area is still the same for all three one thing you can’t do with the properties palette is get a cumulative area of poly lines now hatch as you can but we don’t have enough hatches to add everything up well we could do some basic math and just multiply this number by three and there you go but we don’t want to do the math Dewey so let’s get the total let’s use our measure geo manned come over here to the Home tab on the ribbon into the utilities panel
and click on the measure arrow and click area now remember we want to add all three areas up together so you have to start with the add function so type in the letter A
4ad and now 0 for object no need to pick all this will just select our objects once all three have been picked we’ll press ENTER and we see our individual area of the perimeter and our total area for all three which is what we were looking for press ENTER let’s exit out of here again press f2
and we have our total area right here now we can copy this out
paste it into an email and send it off to our boss project done we’re ready to go home not quite what’s the perimeter of the rink so go okay well how are we going to do that when we need to find the distance we want to find multiple points
so make sure you type in em for multiple points but not until your first point if you start off typing it in AutoCAD just gives you that a invalid point what were you doing yeah dummy do it the right way so we pick our first point now we can tell it m for multiple or you can click right here on the command line
and we just want a quick estimate here so it won’t go through all of the details
just the major ones
remember your scroll wheel can pan zoom and move you about while you’re working inside this command which is extremely useful I suggest that’s the way you do it as opposed to using the pan or zoom commands transparently as we discussed previously in other chapters but using these tools in the middle of a command for something like this makes everything so much easier pick your last point a center and there’s our distance are our perimeter 1477 units and some change left over now that we have this information we need to clean up this drawing for our boss now because he wants us to email it to the client so let’s make sure that it’s as small as it can be and that we don’t give the client anything that they don’t need so start the purge command
let’s make sure the purge nested items have been selected and we do want to get rid of everything so hit the purge all purge all items
and there we go so now we’re ready to send this file once we’ve saved it and get it to the client in a small and efficient manner oh wait a minute the boss just came up and he says that he wants to add another ring into the plan for the client because they requested it well that happens all the time and we need to get our blocks and our layers back okay well we haven’t closed the file yet so it’s still safe even though we saved it so what we need to do is go back to the undo and get rid of the purge
alright now let’s test it out if we type the purge command in again yep
everything’s still listed we’re good to go save the file and we’re ready to draw another rink but of course then we’re going to have to get new measurements