Subtitles of the Movie

We're now going to look at Measuring Distances and Areas in AutoCAD 2010. We're going to use the Measure Geometry Tool. This is on the Home tab on the Ribbon and it's in the Utilities Panel here, and if I hover over the word Measure you can see there's a Fly-out arrow there. If I click on that Fly-out arrow it gives me all the options there for the Measure Geometry Tool. So I have Distance, Radius, Angle, Area, and Volume. What I'm going to do is measure a Distance, first of all, so I click on Distance on the Options List there, come into the Drawing Area and it prompts me to specify the first point that I'm measuring from to measure my distance. I'm going to zoom in on this alcove here, and this has been earmarked for a downstairs bathroom in the property and I need to measure the width of the alcove just to check that we can fit a toilet unit and a sink unit in there. So using my Endpoint Object Snap here I left-click, I then come down here to the other Endpoint Object Snap and again left-click. AutoCAD tells me the Distance there; it also give me an Angle there of 90 degrees, which is fairly obvious. The two lines are perpendicular to each other Ð the horizontal and the vertical Ð but it tells me that it's 700 millimeters wide so I should be able to fit a toilet unit against that vertical wall there in the alcove and then build a stud wall partition out from the alcove, include a door, and include a downstairs bathroom. The good thing is I'm still in the Measure Geometry Tool. What I can do now is go and pick a different option from the Menu List here, and I'm going to select Area. I'm then going to zoom out and look at the whole of the ground floor of the house here. What I want to do is calculate the area here. Once I've subtracted the area of the kitchen and the garage here. So how do I do that? Well, I right-click first of all and go to Add Area. If I add an area I can then subtract areas from it. Now it's prompting me now to specify the first Corner Point of the area. It's asking me to draw all the way round the area, picking Corner Points as I go. I don't need to do that. I can right-click and Select Object, and I can pick the Polyline that makes up the Gross Internal Area. So if I click on that now it highlights the area that I'm selecting in a pale green, and what I can do there is right-click and then on the Dynamic Input there it shows me the Area Ð this is the Total Gross Area Ð of the floor outline, which is 38163750. Remember that's in square millimeters, so we would need to do a conversion there to perhaps convert it up to square meters. Now I'm still in the Area Command of the Measure Geometry Tool, so if I right-click now I can go to Subtract Area and again it prompts me: Specify first corner point. Now I could trace around my kitchen here and my garage here using the corners. I don't need to. They've got Polylines as well, so it's a right-click and Object again, like we did with the Gross Internal Area. I'm now in Subtract Mode Select Object, so I click on the Polyline that makes up the kitchen there. Notice it highlights it in a pale brown distinguishing it from the other areas on the drawing. If I click on the garage as well that again is in a pale brown. So I can easily see now that the pale green area is the area that I'm going to calculate. So if I right-click now it gives me the Total Area of the green area there, which is 21275000. So what it's done there, it's subtracted the areas of the kitchen and the garage from the first area I calculated to give me that green area. As you can see, it's completely visual. I can see exactly what I've done because of the greens and the browns. A picture paints a thousand words as they say. Now, what we can do here to look at these areas is obviously you've got them on the Dynamic Input there in front of you following you around with the crosshair, but you might want to see the actual process. So you press the F2 key and that brings up the AutoCAD Text Window. So now you can see, there's my Total Area there, I've subtracted the area of the Kitchen there; I've subtracted the area of the Garage there, and there's my Total Area, right at the bottom there: 21275000. I'm just going to close the Text Window now so that we can see the drawing again. So as you can see there, the Measure Geometry Tool is extremely useful for measuring Distances, Angles, Areas, and Radii. You can stay in that Measure Geometry Tool and work your way around a drawing calculating all of that information in one go without coming out of the Tool at any time.