I am actually thanking the AutoCAD gods profusely for finally putting geometric constraints AND parametrics into the program. Woo-Hoo! I am going to have such a great time touring and showing my fellow AutoCAD users the power of these two tools and how much smarter your drawings are actually going to be. There will be plenty of people blogging today about all the new features so I'm just going to offer up a high-level view on one of these powerful features.
AutoCAD 2010 Geometric Constraints
I know all about constraints because of Autodesk Inventor. While learning Inventor I completely embraced the extreme power constraints can add to a design. I have been pleading with the AutoCAD team ever since to put constraints into AutoCAD. You can't even imagine my happiness now that my wish has come true (oh yes there was dancing involved!).
So here is the deal with constraints. We have object snaps in AutoCAD - but these work only temporarily. If I draw a line perpendicular to another one using object snaps there is nothing to keep me from rotating it later so it is no longer perpendicular. If I add a perpendicular constraint to the objects I can ensure that it will always be perpendicular - no matter what I do to the two lines. Let's take a quick look - below I have a random shape with no constraints.
I would like the line at the bottom to be horizontal...I'll use the new Parametric tab in the Ribbon and grab the Horizontal tool and select that line.
Now I have this...and that line will remain horizontal forever! (or until I delete that constraint - so in AutoCAD "forever" doesn't necessarily indicate a committment).
Notice the little horizontal icon that displays showing you that there is a horizontal constraint on that line (incidentally you can turn those icons off).
Now I'd like to make that lower right corner perpendicular. I will select the horizontal line FIRST (very important) and the second line I select will become perpendicular to the first one.
and I now have this!
Now I'd like the two horizontal lines to be parallel with each other: I will select the parallel tool and select the two lines.
and now we are here:
Do you get the idea? Are you getting any clever ideas of what you can do to make your designs smarter? Or are you now realizing just how lazy you can now be while you are drawing? There are so many great constraints - let's take a quick look at the others:
coincident (sharing a point)
collinear
concentric
vertical
tangent
symmetric
smooth
equal
Equal is a very powerful constraint...if you have two lines that you always want to be the same size you can use Equal. Then if you change the length of one - the other automatically updates! Two circles, two arcs, etc!. Imagine the possibilities...
And here is a very important tip when working with constraints - when constraining two objects - whichever one you want to win - select that one first! With perpendicular - the line you select first will stay put and the second line you select will make the move to become perpendicular. Make sense?
I'm off to explore more of the great features in AutoCAD 2010! It's all so exciting...
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