Rectangles And Ellipses

rectangles and ellipses are special forms of polygons in AutoCAD rectangles are fairly straightforward where ellipses can be a bit tricky but there are still a lot of things and a lot of ways that you can draw rectangles rectangles work a lot like the polygon command except you’re stuck with the criteria of a rectangle only for sides you get two parallel sets of sides that are equal you get to pick two points and opposite sides of the rectangle to create your shape so if we come to the ribbon and we can find the rectangle command here and you can kind of get an idea of how you’re going to pick it your first point and then your second point very straightforward and simple enough that’s your rectangle and then once you select it it’s just a regular polyline that happens to be closed
now it is a bit more complicated because you have a lot more options to it than that if you start the rectangle command which by the way you can just type re C on the command line or the full word rectangle now you have a lot of different options down here channel for elevation fill it thickness and width some of those aren’t available in AutoCAD LT but if we pick our first point
we get another set of options area dimensions and rotation so your first choices will affect your second choices but as with the line command you can tell it how big you want your rectangle to be if I type in 40 the horizontal distance of my rectangle will be 40 units if I press the tab key and type in 30 now my vertical length will be 30 units
there you go
and then of course you can always grip edit
when you’re done
when you start the rectangle command you have some different options chamfer elevation fill that we kind of mentioned these before the chamfer and Phillip will work very similarly a chamfer will automatically you will chamfer the corners so let’s tell it four units by four units
whenever we draw our rectangle you can see the corners will be clipped and this is still a polyline
the rectangle command again those settings are still set into AutoCAD those off we’ll have to define a chamfer of zero units
or you can even make them to be different I can tell it to units and then eight units and you’ll get a long clipped chamfer as you can see doesn’t do it the same way it starts and it kind of goes around
now the Filip command works the same way only it puts a round corner
your other options elevation which is not available in AutoCAD LT will draw a rectangle at a certain elevation so let’s say 40
look any different but
rotate my view you can see it’s up higher and he can’t do this in AutoCAD LT this is only a feature in regular AutoCAD
but that’s one thing you can do another option is in the thickness give it a thickness of five
and again
as you can see this is just a 3d shape it’s five units tall or thick again not available in AutoCAD LT
and then the last option the width we’ll give it away the five
now this is an option that’s available in AutoCAD LT that makes the thickness of the line there’s a global width just like a regular polyline of five units now it’s also still set to be thick and at an elevation of 50 whenever you make one of those changes to the settings of the rectangle command you have to make sure to set them back until of course you close AutoCAD or the file and then reopen it then it will be reset to the default settings now we saw some other options once you start drawing you have area dimensions and rotation and a rotation will allow you to draw your rectangle rotated
so you pick your angle by picking a point or typing in the angle you want and then you draw it in the regular way and again you’re going to stay that way unless you reset your rotation back to zero and continue drawing
another rectangle command again with the area which is kind of interesting you’d say that you want to have a shape for a swimming pool that is 1,000 units and your square units press enter.now do you want the length or the width the length will determine the horizontal side and the width will be the vertical so let’s say length and let’s say we want it to be 200 units in length it will automatically draw it so that it fits the shape let’s try that again but was something that works a little better we’ll go area and then we’ll go
1,000 units
we’ll length again this time we’ll say 20 and there you go
now you have a rectangle with thickness they square footage or square units of 1000 units so if you’re trying to design a swimming pool or a room for your house and you need it to be a certain square footage and you know you want one length to be a certain length then it’s very easy to get the other lengths without having to do any math and then the last option that will show here is the dimensions the dimension option is very similar to when you entered in the links and sides earlier so you’ll just be able to type in the lengths that you want say 30 and then 50 and it locks it in for you
so the dimension
is a left over from before AutoCAD had the dynamic input where it was very easy to type in your length and width so you probably won’t ever use that but I wanted to show it to you in case you were wondering what it was now let’s clear some of this off
to show you the ellipse command the ellipse is a little bit different but it’s similar to a circle in an arc and that you have multiple ways to draw them you can even draw an elliptical arc an ellipse is essentially an oval and there are two main ways to draw them start the command by just typing in ellipse or al
is to pick the two horizontal points the two horizontal access points that will define how wide the ellipse will be then as you move your crosshairs up or down you are defining the radius of that vertical arc and there you go now edit it with grips again
changing it
moving it
just like any other object so let’s try that again so we type in L and you want to pick
your first point
point and those are the outer points of the ellipse and as you can see you can draw it at several different angles this one’s kind of rotated
now the other option is to pick the center first
and then you pick the end and the other end
from side to side or from centre to side that’s pretty straightforward and you can pick the differences here a center or an arc the arc
one two points
and then your third point
and then you pick where you want it to start and then where you want it to finish
there it is so let’s do that one again you come up to the elliptical arc your to create your ellipse
and then you pick where it starts where it stops
the elliptical arc works just like the arc command in that it’s drawn in a counterclockwise manner and there you go so that’s the rectangle and that’s the ellipse the rectangle is very simple but it has a lot of options the ellipse is a bit tricky because you have to define your axes points or the center point but it has fewer options available to it but both are really cool it can make some great designs