Get to grips with the nuances of CAD workflows, as this in-depth guide discusses drawing door symbols, working with circle options, and even explores different types of circles you can draw. Learn how to utilize these features to develop complex geometrical sketches and how to use certain shortcuts to optimize your design process.
Key Insights
- This tutorial provides comprehensive instructions on drawing a door symbol, starting with creating a new file using the VDCI template and setting up an active layer for symbols. The process also covers basic color setting and file saving protocols.
- The content not only introduces circle options within CAD workflows but also illustrates how to draw different types of circles, including center radius, center diameter, two-point, three-point, tan-tan radius, and tan-tan-tan circles. These circles can be used to create complex geometrical designs and are especially useful when drawing in-between existing geometry.
- The guide emphasizes the importance of mastering shortcuts and features like Select All (Ctrl-A) and Delete, which simplify the design process by allowing you to quickly remove unwanted geometry or replicate existing designs. The tutorial also bookmarks the importance of saving work regularly to prevent data loss.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we will work on the door symbol. Let's go File, New, choose our VDCI template, open, File, Save, and this will be Door-Symbol and save.
Let's add our layer. I'll go to Layer Properties, New Layer, A-SYMS for symbols. I'll change my color to a color of 120.
I'll hit OK, and I will double-click to make it my active layer. Let's close the window and Control-S to save one more time. In this video, I want to talk a little bit about circles and the circle options.
Again, this symbol will have some text that is actually an attribute, not a text object. We will revisit the attributes later in this course. For now, let's talk about circles.
We have already used the Circle Radius tool, and in fact, you can access every circle type by using the Circle tool. If I go into my Home tab, Draw panel, and I click the circle flyout, I can see that I have many types of circles, center radius, center diameter, and so on. All of these circle types can be accessed by using the single Circle Radius tool, and this is because of the options in the command prompt.
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Now, the circle for this symbol is fairly simple. It is a circle at 0,0 with an 8-inch radius, but let's play around with the other circle options and see how they are drawn. For this example, please follow along, but do not worry about where we're clicking or dimensions.
We'll finish this video by drawing the door symbol in the appropriate location. Center radius and center diameter are the most commonly used circles, and you'll remember that we've used center radius and switched to the diameter option in previous videos. If you know you're going to use a center diameter, you can use the flyout, or you can use the options that we've been doing so far.
Center radius and center diameter are fairly simple. Just remember that the distance will be halved visually when you're center diameter, because the distance that it shows from the center of the circle is actually the width of the circle, which is the diameter. Two-point circle draws a circle by using only two points.
These two points can be clicked anywhere on the screen. Two-point circles are generally used when drawing a circle that's in between parallel lines. It is not very common to use a two-point circle or a three-point circle in many CAD workflows, but if you find yourself needing a specific type, two-point and three-point could be used.
Two-point and three-point circles are often used when drawing in-between geometry. In fact, tan-tan radius and tan-tan-tan, which means tangent, are also used when drawing with existing geometry. For this example, I'm going to draw a two-point circle by clicking here and clicking here, and I'm going to draw a three-point circle by clicking here, here, and here.
These circles can be drawn anywhere on your screen. As you can see, I'm just having fun drawing circles at the moment. The tan-tan radius circle is an interesting circle because it allows for geometry to be connected with the tangent object snap.
If I choose tangent-tangent radius, you'll notice that it automatically turns on my tangent object snap, which can be found in the shift-right-click pop menu. I'll use this circle as my first tangent and this circle as my second tangent. Now it wants me to specify a radius.
Now, because I am not typing in dimensions so far, I don't know the size of this circle. So instead, I'm going to click here and draw a radius value of about this distance. There we go.
This circle is now perfectly tangent to the other circle here and here and has the radius value that I was using. The tangent-tangent- tangent circle will automatically fit a circle in between three pieces of geometry, and we have a perfect spot to add one here if it'll fit. First object, second object, and third object.
That circle is perfectly tangent to all three existing circles. Now, to clean up this model and draw the door symbol, all we need to do is a Select All. In order to select all objects, hit CTRL A on your keyboard.
CTRL A is Select All. Now, I can hit the Delete key and it will delete all my geometry. You will see that it will say Erase and the number of circles you had on the screen.
I had six. Now, to draw the door symbol circle, it is fairly simple. Because it asks for a radius value, I will make sure that I choose the Center Radius option.
Notice, by the way, that the 3-point, 2-point, and tangent options are available. But in this case, I will choose 0,0. Enter.
And by checking the handout, I see that my radius is 1 over 8. Enter. I'll do a Zoom Extent so that I can see my circle. There it is.
CTRL S to save. In the next video, we will talk about polygons and the window symbol.
