a drawing an AutoCAD is nothing more than a series of lines and arcs polygons some text and other things this chapter looked at drawing most of those objects and other things as well so let’s make a drawing using as many of those items as we can get through we aren’t going to concentrate on creating an accurate drawing here i’m not a beautiful rendering or anything but we just want to learn how to draw so we’re going to make a basic set of plans that we’re going to give to a landscape architect so that he can go and create his drawings in order to help us landscape our home we’re going to use the tools and commands that we’ve learned about in this chapter so let’s start a brand new file use the new command
and it really won’t matter for what we’re doing what template file you use but I’m going to use the a CAD dwt file but I suggest to use the same one but ultimately it won’t matter we’re not even going to draw it to any specific units or anything we’re just going to draw so in this drawing again we’re going to create a basic very simple landscape plan view of our home we don’t have any numbers to go by or anything specific so I’m just going to provide you with those first we’re going to draw the outline of our house and we’re going to make it with the rectangle command a lot of times the landscape architect will have nothing more than just the outline of a house to design around so start with a rectangle command you can pick it here in the Home tab in the draw panel on the ribbon or you can type in rectangle or just re see now you can pick any point you want in your file here it won’t matter pick a point and now we’re going to try to make this house big enough to live in I guess we’re not sure what our units are and in this case it really won’t matter for our example so let’s just draw the house at 50 units wide press the tab key and then draw 80 units tall or deep and press enter double click the mouse and there’s your rectangle you can scroll out a little and get a look at it
thing fancy nothing freely just a rectangle that is 50 x 80 units we’re going to need to draw our roadway because we have our building and then we have our road that we’re going to need now if the UCS icon gets in your way you can right click on it and go to the UCS icon settings and click on the show UCS icon in origin and that will turn it off that will just get it away from showing it at the origin and will show it in the bottom left hand of your screen it doesn’t change your UCS any but as you can see if as we pan around it just keeps it there that way it helps us know which way is x and y but it gets out of our way for a little bit which is fine and we need to draw the roadway start with the line command it’s in the Home tab on the draw panel or you can type in line just click somewhere below the house
are your line
we’ll make it at about 400 units long but we need to draw it perfectly horizontal so press your f8 key turn on your ortho and type in 400 press Enter
again to cancel the command and there is our road or at least part of it enough representation for our drawing needs now let’s put the road in here completely so we will use a new command that I haven’t shown you before but it’s right here in the modify panel on the Home tab in the ribbon and it’s called offset offset will create a parallel line of another line we just need to give it a distance will type in 20 units press ENTER select the line and then as you move your line up and down or above or below your source line or the first line you selected you’ll see that there’s a preview given when I click my left mouse button that’s where that line is going to go well we want to blow here so left click and there you go it escaped to cancel out of the command so we have the house we have the roadway now we need to be able to get from one to the other we’re going to draw a driveway so we’ll start again with the line command the line command as you’re going to see is one you’re going to use very often hold down your Shift key and right-click this is the oh snap shortcut key window find the nearest it’s the nearest oh snap it’s not the one nearest to where you’re a time you actually mean literally the nearest oh snap it’s right here pick it and now we’re going to be able to start our line right on any of the places we pick from from our house let’s put the garage on the left side here left click
and draw the line
as you see the perpendicular glyph is on our line will be perpendicular than to our road which is what we want
let’s use that offset command again type in 12 because we’ll make our driveway 12 units wide press enter like the line and then offset
there’s our little driveway not a big one you don’t like it that’s okay let’s undo
use the offset command again this time let’s type in 20 units
select the line and left-click and there you go press Enter
now let’s draw a door
have a door and we’ll draw it just so that the landscape architect knows where it is start your line command again type in NEA for the nearest oh snap or use the shift right click to bring up your shortcut window click somewhere on the house here
let’s turn off the ortho command fade button
let’s make our doorway let’s make it five units long and press the tab key and let’s tell it 30 degrees for the angle
because we want to draw a doorway that’s open
now let’s put a little arc in here a lot of times the doors will be depicted as having the line and then an arc use the art command we want to use start center angle since we know these three things select the command with our running oh snaps still on I can automatically snap right to the end point of this line that’s the start now we need the center if you’re not sure of the order of what to do just follow the instructions on the command line this is the center line for our arc because we’re going to draw an arc it starts here at the edge of the door and goes into the building so pick the end point
and now we need to tell it to go to 30 degrees
be careful because drawing to specific degrees can be difficult for autocad to understand exactly what you mean as i move the mouse around you can see that degree number changes
if I am way over here and I type in 30 it may do some weird stuff or it may automatically work be careful with your snaps be careful with your direction in which you’re trying to look at remember the arc comes it starts and then it goes in a counterclockwise direction so if I wanted this arc to come start here come from here and then go down I would have to type in negative 30 degrees so be careful if you get some weird thing just erase it or select it then hit the Delete key and then do it again the last arc command you used will be the one that’s up in this main button area but we use the start center angle because we have the start point we have the center point and we knew the angle was 30 degrees
the scroll wheel and we have a house we have a driveway we have a road and we have a door so far so good one thing we didn’t do though and it was a major mistake and I apologize we have not saved our drawing if autocad were to crash or you were to lose power or your computer were to fail any of those things right now you wouldn’t have any of this work saved anywhere so come up to the Save button click Save find a place to put it and I’m going to save it in my Autodesk 360 folder right here i’m going to call this chapter 5 project and i had started one before when i was reviewing for this video so I’m just going to replace what I had before but you can type in a name give it whatever name you want and click Save
since I already have an older file there it’s saying hey there’s something there with the same name and are you sure you want to do this and I say yes I want to replace that old file if not click no and give it a different name
a file has been saved I won’t lose my work and since I saved it in the Autodesk 360 cloud it saved in the cloud so my computer could literally blow up and burst into flames right now I would not lose my file because it’s saved in the cloud I could access that file download it from any internet-connected computer anywhere and that’s cool
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