size is relative and so is scale sometimes you need an object to be bigger or to be smaller than what it is in order to do that you can use the scale command the scale command will change the size of an object or objects according to a scale factor that factor can be any type of positive and nonzero number you can scale something by a factor of two or by a factor of 0.5 open up the scale examples file here we have two boxes one looks like a square the other on the bottom looks more like a rectangle let’s look at the top the scale command is found right here in the modify panel on the Home tab in the ribbon or you can type in the word scale
or just the two letters s-see
the letter s that will be stretched that’s another command we’re going to look at that’s extremely useful but the scale command is very simple to use start the command press ENTER and then select your objects
pick everything here all of these lines press Enter
and now you need to pick a reference point this point is typically a place on the object but not always and it will stay here so if I pick the end of this box or this bottom left hand corner that point will stay as it is and where it is but as I scale up or down as you can see the box becomes larger or smaller I’m going to turn off my running osnaps by pressing f3 because they’re going to get in the way right now I don’t necessarily want to stamp to something but I can if I want but right now I don’t want to okay so our base point will remain stationary that’s a reference point and everything will be scaled according to the number that we give it the scale factor and be referenced by that scale from that point we picked now your second point is the scale amount or the scale factor as I move away from that point AutoCAD registers a distance that’s the scale factor
you can see the number on my dynamic input changes right now it’s right at about 2.8 or 3.2 so it’s right around a factor of three so this box is three times larger than the original
that’s what it does if I were to type in the number one it would remain the same because it’s a scale factor of 1 if I want the box to be twice as big I type in the number 2 press ENTER now the box is twice as big if I want something to be smaller I select everything pick my base point and if I want to be half a small returning it back to its original size I type in a decimal than a number in this case point five and it’s back to where it was anything less than the number one in a scale factor will make the object smaller anything greater than 1 will make them bigger if you want to keep the original you can use the copy option select your objects press ENTER select your base point and now you’ll see on the command line that there is an option for copy
pick it or type in the letter C type in the number two so our original is still there but now we have a new one that’s twice as big now here’s a trick that I’ve used to divide things into different sizes with the scale factor let’s say I want to draw this box it’s made up of four different lines say that I want to draw two more vertical lines in this box so that I have three equal sections so one here and one here approximately let’s use the scale command to help us out
say well how is that going to happen well show you since I want to divide this up into three equal sections I can use the scale command on this top line and reduce it by one-third now you don’t have to put in a decimal you can put in a fraction one-third press Enter and now this line is one-third of what it used to be if I use the copy command I’ll show you turn on my running osnaps again so I don’t have to type them in grabbing the endpoint turning off my ortho snap once snap twice and back to where I was three equal sections
I can use my copy command again but this time copy this leg
snap to my endpoints of those lines and there you go I have no idea how long this side of the box is but I do know that I just divided it up into three equal parts that’s a neat trick that you can use with the scale command
you
Leave a Comment