Autodesk AutoCAD 2009: Mastering Basic 2D Concepts Course

Welcome to the getting started section of the AutoCAD 2009 Basic 2D Concept course. What we're going to look at here is the AutoCAD user interface briefly and we're going to draw a couple of AutoCAD objects just to show you what can be done within AutoCAD. Now the whole idea of AutoCAD is a primarily 2D drafting tool and as you can see the crosshair is moving up to the Draw Panel on the Ribbon on the top of the screen and this is the new AutoCAD user interface, the Ribbon and the panels are new to AutoCAD 2009. So as you can see you can extend the panels at the top of the screen and working your way through these panels you can draft and create objects. In this particular case a rectangle is going to be created, purely freehand on the screen at this point. Now once the two corners are specified the rectangle appears on the screen. Clicking on the Down Arrows in the panels provide you with more commands and in this case a circle where we're going to specify the center of the radius. Now the idea of this is using objects snaps, you'll notice those symbols appearing on the screen, these object snaps will be covered later in the course but they allow you to position objects and center of circles accurately. We're now going to hatch the area between the rectangle and the circle by picking an internal point in the area as shown. This point finds the area between the circle and the rectangle and if you preview that using the hatch dialog box you can see the hatch on the screen. If you're happy with that it's purely a right click or Enter on the keyboard. Objects can be modified once they've been drafted allowing you to edit drawings and change drawings as per specification. It is always the case that drawings get edited and changed through let's say for example a construction process of a building. In this case the objects are being moved, the circle, the rectangle and the hatch, a base point is selected and as you can see the objects move to a different position in the AutoCAD coordinate system. These objects at the moment have been drawn on the default layer, layer 0 in AutoCAD, normally in AutoCAD you would specify different layers for different objects. A new layer has been created called Objects as you can see and a color can be assigned to that layer to allow you to distinguish objects on the drawing. When you have thousands of objects on a drawing these layers allow you to find the appropriate objects that you need to work with, in this case the objects are going on to the Objects layer and the color is red and on the Layer Pull-Down, when you click on the Layer Objects you can directly see the change on the screen.  

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