Subtitles of the Movie

We're now going to look at AutoCAD Points, or Reference Points, in a little bit more detail. Now you'll notice I'm on the Setting Out Layer. I've got a Setting Out line here, Setting Out line at the edge of the house here. What I'm also going to do though is set up my Point Style. There is already an existing Point Style set, but I'm going to show you how to set a Point Style so that we can actually place some Blocks in the drawing. Now this particular part of the house here is eventually going to be the garage, and what we're going to do here, we're going to place a pot-plant, a small shrub here and here, just to basically frame the opening to the garage there. So the first thing we need to do is set our Point Style. That is on the Home tab and it's on the Utilities Panel here. Click on the Fly-out arrow and you'll see there, Point Style. When you click on it, it brings up the Point Style dialog box and as you can see our Point Style is already set. However, what it's also set is the Point Size, which is 5 percent, and the Size is set Relative to the Screen. Now you may have noticed Points on the drawings in previous exercises. That's because they were already set. What we're going to do this time is place some Points on the drawing and then use them to Set Out those two Shrubs ready for the framing of the garage and the driveway. So, I click on OK there now that my Point Style is set, and basically what we've done there is we've kept the settings that we had previously but I now need to place those Points. So I go to the Draw Panel here, click on the Fly-out menu here and you'll see here Multiple Points. So I click there, come into the Drawing Area and it prompts me to Specify a point. Now, I'm just placing points on the drawing, so let's do that. I'm going to hover over this corner here and what I'm going to do, notice OTRACK is switched on down on the Status Bar at the bottom of the screen. When I hover over that Endpoint there, if I now drag upwards my Extension Snap kicks in because it's switched on and I can now place my shrub exactly a certain distance away from that corner. It's going to be 750, so I type in 750 as a distance, Enter, and there's my Point, exactly 750 from the corner of the house. I'm going to hover over this corner here, like so, same process again. I drag upwards and there's my Extension Snap, I type in 750 and press Enter again, like so. Now you'll think that when I press Enter again now it should get me out of the Point Command. It doesn't. It gives me: Invalid point. I actually have to hit Escape to cancel the Point Command. It's one of the only AutoCAD Commands where you have to do that. So, now what I'm going to do is place these shrubs on those Points. Now the Points themselves utilize the Node Snap, so if I go down to OSNAP down at the bottom of the screen here and click on OSNAP, or right-click even would be better, like so, and select Node there, notice it's already got the blue square in AutoCAD 2010. That means it's on already. If I click on Quadrant there, look what happens. If I now go back down to OSNAP, switch it on and right-click, you'll see that Quadrant is on, yeah? So, those little blue squares indicate on or off. So, Node is on. I'm going to click on Quadrant again there, just to turn it off. So now I want to place my blocks using the Node Snap. So I go to the appropriate Layer, which is my Shrubs Layer, so Shrubs is now my Current Layer. I then Insert the block, so I click on Insert here, Shrub Small Ð that's the one I want Ð Insertion Point, Specify On-screen, Scale 1, Rotation 0 is fine, I click on OK, I then hover over that Point, which is a Node Snap, left-click, and there's my Shrub on top of the Node itself. I'll do that again now. Insert, Shrub Small, OK it, place it over the Node there, left-click, and there's my Block on top of my Point. So you can see there the Points allow you to accurately place objects on the drawing. They're great for Setting Out points, Location points for blocks, even measuring and dividing objects, which we'll cover in a moment. So, utilize those Points and those Point Styles. They are very, very useful. What you'll also find, if I just zoom out slightly now those Points get very small. However, if I type regen to regenerate the view, see how big those Points get? They're always 5 percent of the screen size if you perform the Regen Command, which regenerates the model in the Model Space. So again, I emphasize, use those Points for setting out. Use those Points to place Blocks in the drawing.