Autodesk AutoCAD 2010: Basic 2D Concepts Tutorials
Setting Up Model Tab (Modelspace) / Setting Your Units
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Subtitles of the Movie (Autodesk AutoCAD 2010: Basic 2D Concepts / Setting Up Model Tab (Modelspace) / Setting Your Units)
We now need to set our Units for our drawing and the way that we're going to do this is we're going to utilize the Drawing Units Dialog Box. Now we have covered this briefly already in this Course previously. Now, what I'm going to do here is go into it in a bit more detail so that you're aware of how your Unit Settings coexist with your working environment. This particular drawing is a metric drawing and we're working in millimeters, so we need to make sure that our Units reflect those settings that we're working in in our environment. To get to the Drawing Units Dialog Box again we go up to the Application Menu, the big red A, we click on the down arrow, and we go down to Drawing Utilities here, and hover over this little arrow here, and as you can see, there are our Units, there in the right-hand pane of the Dialog Box there. So, we click on Units and that will bring up the Drawing Units Dialog Box. Now, we don't actually need to see the drawing behind, but what we're going to do here now, we're going to look at our settings. Now, when we're working with a line, for example, we normally measure the length of a line by way of clicking on a point and then dragging to another point and clicking again. So, what we need to do there is make sure that the precision is the appropriate precision; but more importantly, we make sure that the readout is appropriate to our environment, so we need a metric setting. So when we click on Type here you'll see that you've got Architectural. If I hover over Architectural, or Decimal, or Engineering, or Fractional, or Scientific, there is no preview there to let you know what's going on. We want Decimal, though. Architectural engineering are actually imperial settings, and the Fractional is also an Imperial setting, and Scientific is for very large distances, which we're not using. So, we select Decimal. Our Precision has to be consistent with where we're working, so that's for Linear measurements, as in length, so we're going to go for two decimal places. Now Angles. Again, we have various settings there that we can use. We're going to use Decimal Degrees, but you have the option for Degrees, Minutes, and Seconds. Gradients or Radians, which are mathematical methods of calculating angles, or you can use Surveyors Units, which apply to points of the compass. So, Decimal Degrees it is, and again, your precision here is important. We're going to go for four decimal places, the reason being we might need a small angle, and an angle over a long distance, if you don't know the precision of it, could affect that angle. We can also set it so that our angles are either measured Clockwise, or if we untick it, Counterclockwise. The default setting is Counterclockwise, so the default setting is that box unticked, and you'll find most people that work in AutoCAD do not tick that box. Insertion Scale, when we're inserting blocks in the drawing from different drawings, you can choose which Units to insert. So as you can see there we're working in Millimeters because we are a metric millimeters drawing. Lighting, down here at the bottom, is for specifying the intensity of lighting when you're rendering 3D drawing environments. There are three settings: International, American, and Generic. We won't be using those, so we'll just leave it at the default, International. Now, the last thing we need to set is Direction, and as you can see, when we measure our angles, our base angle zero is pointing to the East; pointing to the right along he X axis. North, going upwards in a positive Y direction is 90. West, going to the left in a negative X direction is 180, and South, going downwards in a negative Y direction is 270. When you come back to zero again, that doubles up as 360. We will leave that as it is, so we'll just click on Cancel there so that no changes are saved. And also here, we're now going to click on OK to set our Length and our Angle Units. We have now set our Units for our drawing. Now if you look down at the bottom of the screen on the Status Bar at our Coordinate readouts, you can see that Lengthwise, along the X and Y axis there, you can see that we have two decimal places, which is what we set in our Drawing Units Dialog Box.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Autodesk AutoCAD 2010: Basic 2D Concepts |
| Author: | Shaun Bryant |
| SKU: | 34013 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-56-4 |
| Release Date: | 2009-07-03 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 107 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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