Polygons

there will be many times when you need to create what is called a polygon a polygon is a multi-sided closed shape in AutoCAD it’s also a polyline there is a command called polygon with this command you can draw shapes from three sides all the way up to 1024 sides typically you would probably only want to draw about 32 maybe 10 sides and there is a case where you want to draw 360 sides which is essentially a circle but it’s good to know that you have options available to you you can type the word polygon right on the command line
or you can use the command alias which is just pol
it’s also found here on the ribbon polygon now it’s very simple you enter in the number of sides you want so if you want to draw a Pentagon you would type in the number five and press ENTER and now you need to pick the center of your polygon and you have an option and inscribed in the circle or circumscribed about a circle so what are those mean well what the difference is and what this means between an inscribed or circumscribed is that we have a circle just imagine you have a circle let’s give it a radius of 5 units and you want to draw a polygon
we want it to be five sides and the center of your polygon will match the center of the circle the inscribed method will draw the hexagon inside the circle and a circumscribed polygon or hexagon in this case we’ll draw the shape on the outside so think inside as you can see while I go to pick my point where i want it i can type in the radius which would match the radius of the circle and i would pick my location so i can snap with an nea or an ear and i will pick anywhere on this circle there’s my Pentagon now if i start the polygon command again with 5 sides the center of the circle and instead of inscribed I’ll go circumscribed somewhere on that circle or use the same radius
on the outside of the circle so those are the two differences the inscribed will draw the shape in this case a hexagon from one of the vertices or the vertex the circumscribed will pick from the midpoint of one of the edges information you have and what you’re trying to draw that will determine your method of drawing it
now there’s another method as well and when you put in the number of sides this option comes up instead of picking your center point right away you can type in the letter E or click on the edge now this will draw the polygon in a very different way it will draw it based on your edge length so I pick my first point
that acts as a pivot point for my shape and now you can type in the distance for that leg or side and then I can type in the angle i type in five four five units press tab and I’ll type in the degrees 90 degrees so this leg will be straight up
and there you go so you really have three different ways to draw a polygon and you can make it any number of sides remember it can be as few as three but no more than 1024
good point inscribe
and here is my octagon so there are a lot of different ways to draw a polygon and a polygon is really just a closed polyline once you draw it it doesn’t retain its shape if you grip edit anything once I make changes that shape is no longer what it was when I first created it