Creating and Positioning 2'4 Doors with Arcs Using Copy, Rotate, and Mirror Tools in AutoCAD

Let's begin to create the doors for our floor plan. Now, I'm currently on the A wall layer.

We want to switch to the A door layer. So let's go to our layer dropdown and choose A door to make it our current layer. And now let's take a quick look at our handout.

We can see that there are a lot of different doors and door types in this drawing. We have the bifolding doors for the closets. We have the garage doors.

We have a custom front door where half of it is closed. We have some door swings on this closet and this closet that have a 45 degree angle. But overwhelmingly, for the most part, we have single door swings.

So it's one panel opening 90 degrees with a door swing arc. And again, that's a representative arc showing the direction of the door swing. Additionally, if we look at it a little bit more closely, we can see that the majority of our doors are either 2 foot 6 or 2 foot 4. So that's where I want to start.

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Let's start by putting in the majority of our doors using some 2 foot 6 and 2 foot 4 doors as a copy object. We're going to start with a 2 foot 4 door, copy it, paste it into place near where we're going to use it, and then use rotate and mirror to orient it in the right location. You will see many offices using blocks for their doors and potentially also for their windows.

But in this course, we want to practice using our modify tool set. We're going to use copy base and we're going to use our modifier tools. Okay, so let's get started.

Let's start with 2 foot 4, and that's going to be mainly used in our bathrooms. So I'm over on the side here. I'm going to go to the rectangle tool.

I'm going to click anywhere on the screen. And using my dimensions, D, enter for dimensions, I'm going to type 1.5, enter, 2 feet 4 inches, enter. And I'll click on any quadrant to place my rectangle.

I'll zoom in a little bit more. And again, we're going to use copy base to put this object in the clipboard using the hinge point, and then we'll bring it over to the rest of our door locations. Before we do that, let's make sure we put our door swing in.

I'm going to go to my arc drop down. I'll choose center start end. I'll choose my center as this end point on the hinge.

My start can be up here at the top. And then notice that if I go to the left, I'm going to see an arc appearing in this direction. Now, in this case, I want to go to the right.

Remember, when you're drawing an arc, you can hold control to switch the direction. So I'll show on the right side, holding control. And then if you choose the other end point of the door, you'll get that 90 degree angle.

Of course, you could also turn on ortho and click, but in this case, I'll just choose the other end point of my door. There we go. We've now created our two foot four inch door, and we've drawn the door arc.

Now I'm going to grab both of these objects, and I'm going to go edit, copy with base point. And I'm going to choose my hinge point, which is the end point right here. All right.

Specify base point two found. That means our copy base has been successful. I'll hit escape, escape, escape, and control V to just preview my door.

Excellent. That's exactly what we want. Now I'm going to hit escape a couple of times, and then let's go over into our model and see where we need to paste our door.

Let's zoom in up here. We can see that there's a couple of locations where this two foot four door fit in this bathroom. One is right here, but if I paste this in and place it here, we see that the door swing is facing the wrong direction.

This isn't what we want. So instead, I'll hit delete, and I'll paste using this end point right here. Now the door is clearly in kind of the right spot.

The hinge is where we want it to be, but clearly the door is in the wrong direction. We need to mirror this door over this line right here. So I'll go mirror.

I'll choose my rectangle and my arc, enter to lock it in. And I'll zoom in on this wall, click this end point, and then this end point. Now, in this case, we do want to erase the source objects.

We only want to mirror the object and leave the copy. So I'll go Y, enter to erase source objects. Control S to save.

Next, let's work on this door location. Again, I'm going to find the hinge point, and I'll paste the door right there. Now this one's a slightly different operation.

Instead of mirroring, we can simply rotate this 90 degrees counterclockwise, which is the positive rotation direction in AutoCAD. So I'll go rotate, click my door and my arc, enter to lock it in. I'll pick the hinge point as my center point for the rotation.

And then I'm going to rotate up. Again, I can choose the end point of the wall here or type in 90, enter. I'll choose the end point.

And there we go. We've used copy base to place two of our two foot four doors, and we've rotated and mirrored them successfully. Control S to save.

Let's go down to this bathroom here. We have similar situations for both of these doors. First, let's focus on this door.

I'll hit Control V to paste. And this time it's another mirror operation. I'll place it at the hinge point here.

Again, that's at the bottom of the wall, the inside of the bathroom, not at the outside. This is going to get mirrored across this wall line. So I'll go mirror, select both of my bits of geometry, enter to lock it in.

I can mirror across this wall edge here and point to end point. Y enter to erase. Excellent.

Let's hit Control V to paste one more time. This one's a little trickier. Again, it's another rotation and I'll place it at the hinge point here.

Here we're going to rotate down and to the right. That's a clockwise direction and it's a negative angle in AutoCAD. So I'll go rotate, picking these two bits of geometry, enter to lock it in.

My center point will be the hinge point, which is the end point here. And then we're going to bring this down negative 90 degrees in AutoCAD and I'll click the end point here to lock it in. Zoom extents, Control S to save.

Okay, there's only one more two foot four door and it's this door right here in the closet. Now notice this door is only open 45 degrees. That's totally fine.

Control V to paste and the hinge point is up here. It's the same rotation we just did for the other door. I'll go rotate, selecting these two objects, enter to lock it in.

I'll choose the same hinge point, which is the end point here. This time though, instead of showing this degree angle and locking it into the end point, we have to rotate an additional 45 degrees. Let's go down and turn on our polar tracking and let's make sure it shows 45 degrees as our rotation option.

And now I can find that 45 degree variant, which is 225 degrees. That's what AutoCAD tells me. And I can click.

Now the door is open 45 degrees, but our arc, our door swing clearly goes too far into the closet. That's okay. TR Enter to activate trim and we can simply trim it out.

Enter to say that I'm done and zoom extents. I'll erase this door by selecting it and hitting the delete key. Control S to save.

In the next video, we will go through a very similar process for the two feet, six inch doors. See you there.