Subtitles of the Movie

OK. So now we're going to look at Polar Tracking in AutoCAD 2010. Now when we looked at ORTHO previously we realized that when we switched ORTHO on POLAR turned Off. Now, the reason for that is you can also draw in an Orthographic fashion using POLAR providing your Polar Tracking angle is set to 90 degree increments, i.e., the lines are always at 90 degrees to each other, vertical and horizontal, or perpendicular to use the mathematical phrase. However, Polar Tracking allows you to track at any angle that you set AutoCAD to track when you're drawing lines or circles or arcs or any other AutoCAD object. So, let's have a look at that. POLAR is down on the Status Bar in the Drafting Settings, so let's right-click over POLAR and what we're going to do is we're going to go to Settings. Now you'll notice it's a bit like the Icons with the Object Snap that we talked about. You can set Default Angles. Now you'll notice the Default Angle there is 90 degrees and we've got 45, 30. We can set it to any angle that we want. I want to show you how to do that before we start using Polar Tracking. So, we go to Settings there on the Shortcut Menu. It brings up the Drafting Settings dialog box with the Polar Tracking tab current. Now we need to switch Polar Tracking on, so we tick the box. We need to look at now our Increment Angle. There they are there, the same as when you right-click over the POLAR Button. Now the Default is 90 degrees. That's what we're going to use but I can also tick here and add additional angles, click on New, and I can type in on any angle I like. It could be 43.36, and AutoCAD would still draft at that Polar Angle for us. I'm not going to add it in this case. I'm going to untick the box and just leave it at 90 with Polar Tracking on. So, I OK that there. Let's have a look now at using some Polar Tracking on our drawing. Now, you'll see that we're gradually building this drawing up as we work through the Drafting Settings, so I'm going to work from this Endpoint here and this Endpoint here and recreate this Angle here, this L-Angle, like so. What we're going to do is we're going to go down to POLAR here, we're going to right-click, and make sure that it's at 90. It is. So, I'm going to click on 90 there and that makes sure that it's set at 90. Also as well we're going to go down to Object Snap, which we're going to cover shortly, but I want to make sure that we right-click and just have a look at our Icons here and make sure that our Endpoint Snap is on. And if I just move away from it slightly there, so you can see it, the Endpoint Snap has a blue square around the Icon for Endpoint. That indicates that the Endpoint Snap is on, so I can hit Escape there once to leave that Endpoint Snap switched on, rather than click on it, switch it off and then have to switch it on again. So, let's go to our Line Command now, which is on our Home tab on the Draw Panel, click on the Line Command. Now what I'm going to do is hover over the Endpoint Snap there and left-click. Now as I drag along you'll notice I Ð can you see the zero degrees there? Ð That is my Polar Tracking telling me that I'm at zero degrees. The Polar with the distance and the angle symbol and the zero degrees, is telling me at the moment that I'm 55.3007 units from that Endpoint Snap I just clicked on. You can also see that in the Distance Box, highlighted in blue on the Dynamic Input. Now, one of the tricks here is with AutoCAD is you can type in a Distance in the Distance Box. It's called a Direct Distance Entry. So, let's type in a Distance there of 85, and press Enter. We've now used Polar Tracking to draw a line at exactly zero degrees that's 85 units long. So that ties in nicely now. Can you see that with our squares there? Now, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to zoom in a bit now and roll upwards on the wheel mouse a little bit so that we've got a bit more detail. Now as I move around look. Can you see it lock off at 90 degrees there? If I come to the left it locks off at just there, if I just keep coming, then at 180 degrees. Sometimes it takes a little bit of just fine-tuning to get it to show up. 270 degrees, and back up here to zero. So you can see that's our Polar Tracking kicking in at 90 degree increments. I'm going to track upwards, so you see there, look: Polar 13.1324 at 90 degrees. I've got my Distance Box again, I want it to be 15 units going upwards at 90 degrees. I type in 15, I press Enter, and then I press Enter again to close out the Line Command. As you can see there I've replicated what I have over here on the left. I have my vertical line, my horizontal line, my horizontal line, my vertical line. Let's repeat that exercise now. Line Command. Snap to Endpoint. Left click. Drag along the zero-degree Polar Tracking line and in the Distance Box type in 85, and press Enter. You can see that ties in nicely with our square there. I'm going to zoom in, and I'm just going to drag that downwards this time at 270 degrees. You can see that on the Polar Tracking readout on the Dynamic Input there. I'm going to type in 15 again like I did on the previous one, and press Enter, and then Enter again to come out of the Line Command, and as you can see we have successfully drawn our lines there using the Polar Tracking Settings in AutoCAD.