From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

Using Grid and Snap - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

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Using Grid and Snap

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In this chapter, we're going to take a look at some of the tools available in AutoCAD to allow you to draw accurately. And we've got a new drawing for that purpose, it's called DrawingAccurately.dwg, surprise surprise, with the file name there. But the whole idea of this file is it's a nice blank file that we're going to work in. And I'm going to use some very simple examples to show you how these accuracy tools and precision tools in AutoCAD allow you to draft effectively. So make sure you've opened up the DrawingAccurately.dwg file, again, download it from the library to follow along with the videos. And make sure that you go to the Home tab on the Ribbon, go to the Layer drop-down here in the Layers panel, and click on the word Objects to make sure that the Objects layer is the current drafting layer. It's a nice blue colour, so it will allow you to see what's going on on the screen a bit more easily. Now, I normally use what is called the dark mode in AutoCAD. That's the grey and the black that you can see on the screen. Now, you can't really see the grid that I'm going to talk about that easily on the darker background. So, I'm just going to make one quick change so that you can see what this grid is all about. So, I'm going to right-click, go to Options, and I'm going to go to Display and to Colours here, like so. And what I'm going to do, I'm going to go into 2D model space here and uniform background and change that to a white background. And then click on apply and close and click on OK for a moment. As you can see, your drawing area in AutoCAD now looks like a mathematics notebook, right? With the little squares that you use when you're doing your maths at school. And that grid can be used as a fantastic drafting aid because it allows you to draft accurately at regular spacings. So what I'll do now is I'll quickly right click and go back to options, I'll go back to the display tab, into colours, I need to go into the 2D model space here and I need to go to uniform background and I'll just restore it to the colour it was, crosshairs also needs to be restored, as does viewport control needs to be restored as well. If ever you change your background you need to reset those three interface elements. I'll apply and close and okay. And you can see there now, obviously I'm back to my darker colors with my grid on the screen. Now, like I said, we're gonna be using snap and grid. They're down here on the status bar. They're these two little icons here. So there's grid, there's snap. Right click on either of them and go to grid or snap settings, depending on which one you've right clicked on. And it will take you to the snap and grid tab in the drafting settings dialog. Now, what we're gonna do here, going to set some settings so that we can work with our snap and our grid so make sure snap on is ticked in the checkbox and same with grid on there as well you want equal x and y spacing you want that ticked in the checkbox as well now make sure snap x and snap y are set to 50 if they're not just type it in like i'm showing you now and then type in 50 there press tab and the y spacing will update accordingly so same with grid there make sure that that's 50 press tab and the y value will update to 50 as well. I'm setting a major line every five grids so if you look at the grid behind the dialog can you see there's like a thicker grid line every five grid cells can you see that so I'm going to click on ok there now so that's my snap and grid settings in place Now we're not going to use any object snaps or polar tracking or anything at all, we're just going to use the grid. So polar tracking here, click on it, turn it off. Object snap tracking, click on it, turn it off. You see they go grey instead of blue? Same with your object snaps, turn your object snaps off in this particular case. And then I'm going to roll up on the wheel a couple of notches as well, just so we can see the grid a little bit better. Home tab on the ribbon, and then I'm going to click on the line command. Now the good thing about this is I can draw things now by snapping to this grid. Can you see the mouse movement has become jerky and basically the crosshair is trying to snap to each grid line. Can you see that and as I move from grid to grid watch if I go there can you see 4,250 move to the next one 4,500 can you see if I zoom in closer so there's even more grids as well. So you'll notice that I've got 4,000, go across, that's 4,250, 4,500 and so on. So I wanna zoom in like that. And what I'm going to do, I'm gonna click, doesn't matter which grid you use, click there, move along 10 grid squares. So you're moving along 500, left click again. Notice that's accurate to the grids. Click there, 250, I'm coming vertically upwards, five squares this time and each square is 50 remember I set that in the snap and grid settings so all I've got to do is move along these grids and click each time when I get to there I can right-click and close and that will close to where I started from where I was using the line command so that's how quick and easy that is and I know that each of those lines is accurate so I know the horizontal lines are 500 long and I know the vertical lines are 250 because each grid square is 50 units in this particular drawing and that's how you use snap and grid in AutoCAD it's that quick and it's that easy just zoom out slightly in preparation for the next video

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