WEEK 10 ACAD Polylines:

Are continuous lines – made up of various segments – they can be used to construct closed areas for hatching and many other uses including preparing drawings for laser cutters or CNC machines.

Shortcut

PL

- So polylines can be constructed from scratch using the PL command or converting an existing set of standard lines using the PE (poly edit) command. –

Ploy Edit enables us to join a series of lines together to create a continuous polyline- select a line – turn it into a polyline then join additional lines .

BEWARE: If your lines do not meet ( have gaps )- you’re probably not using the OSNAP options.. turn OSNAP on (F3) and make sure the lines are connected – use then fillet or trim tools .. Lines that don’t meet can cause a whole host of problems especially when applying hatching/ laser cutting …etc….

We can create complex curves by transforming a Polyline(PL) using Poly Edit (PE) – use the fit option or spline option.

Pink – Line using Fit

Yellow- Original polyline

Green – Line using the Spline option

Hatching.

Keyboard short cut –H.

Watch out for Graps.

Dimensioning..

Always add Dimensions in paperspace –

Always use the Annotative setting – This means that the size of the dim changes for you depending on the scale of the viewport – you don’t have to work it out.

To change the setting of the dimensioning use the Dimstyle command to bring up the Dimensioning editor- here you can alter all the dimension settings.

You may want to lock the viewports when adding the dims – as they can easily move – select the viewport >right click on the view port > choose display locked> yes!

Click here for additional tools

Make sure you’re in paper space (NB-no thick bold outer line) when you

add dims & states Paper here….