8
Down the Straightaway
- Drawing linear things with the AutoCAD drawing commands
- Lining up for lines and polylines
- Closing up with rectangles and polygons
As you probably remember from your crayon-and-coloring-book days, drawing stuff is fun. CAD imposes a little more discipline, but drawing stuff with AutoCAD is still fun (trust me on this one). In computer-aided drafting, you usually start by drawing geometry — shapes such as lines, circles, rectangles, and so on — that represents the real-world object that you're documenting. This chapter shows you how to draw linear geometry — objects that proceed in a straightforward manner from one point to the next. In Chapter 9, I throw some curves at you.
After you've created some straight or curvy geometry, you'll probably need to add some dimensions, text, and hatching, but those elements come later (in Part III of this book). Or you may want to use that geometry as the basis for some cool 3D modeling (I introduce you to that topic in Part V). Your first task is to get the geometry right; then you can worry about labeling things.
Drawing geometry properly in AutoCAD depends on paying attention to object properties and the precision of the points that you specify to create the objects. I cover these matters in Chapters 6 and 7, so if you eagerly jumped to this chapter to get right to the fun stuff, take a moment to review those chapters first.