Autocad 2007 Drawing Tutorial

Right-clicking a drawing shows a menu displaying the rotate and scale operations.

AutoCAD 2007 is a computer-aided design application. These applications, which are better known as CAD programs, have tools for creating precise graphical specifications. Manufacturing teams use these specifications to construct products both large and small. You create a drawing with AutoCAD 2007 using the mouse to trace linear representations of structures that you are designing. You also use the mouse to reshape the represented structure. Learning to make an AutoCAD drawing yields the initial skills needed to design the structures your work team needs.

Instructions

1. Open AutoCAD and type "rectangle." This places the program in a mode for drawing rectangles.

2. Click and release the left mouse button anywhere on the main drawing canvas. Drag to another screen location to define the rectangle, then click the mouse again to complete the rectangle. This step and the previous one show you how to produce a simple drawing with AutoCAD. You can now modify that drawing.

3. Click any part of the rectangle. The program will display blue squares on the shape, indicating the mode for reshaping the rectangle. Click and drag on any of the squares to change the rectangle to another shape. Press "Escape" to exit the shape-changing mode.

4. Type "Rotate" to enter the mode for revolving drawings, then click a screen location near the modified rectangle. Clicking this location specifies the axis around which the shape will rotate.

5. Drag on the screen to rotate the shape, then click the mouse to complete the rotation.

6. Type "scale," then specify a point and drag the mouse, as you did in the previous two steps. This action will make the shape resize dynamically to follow your mouse.

7. Type "move," then specify a point, and drag the mouse to make the shape move from one location to another. This step completes the basic transformation you can do to a 2-D AutoCAD drawing. Now you can create a 3-D drawing from the 2-D one.

8. Type "orbit," then click the left mouse button, and drag upward slightly on the screen. This action changes the 2-D viewpoint to a 3-D one, which is needed to see the shape turn into a 3-D object.

9. Type "extrude," then drag up or down on the shape to transform it into a 3-D object. Click the mouse to complete the extrusion. (Extrusion is a 3-D modeling term for expanding into 3-D space from a 2-D surface.)

10. Click on the object to display its blue handles, then experiment with the same transformation tools you applied in Steps 3 through 7.

11. Type "render." AutoCAD will create a realistically-shaded drawing of your object.

References

• "AutoCAD 2011 and AutoCAD LT 2011 Bible"; Ellen Finkelstein; 2010