Lesson 4 - Construction

The creation of a drawing requires efficient construction tools. CADEMIA supports the construction of points, lines, circles, vectors, distances and angles. In this lesson these fundamental construction processors are described.

4.1 Point construction (conpoint)

The main construction processor is the one to construct a point. Among other properties all CADEMIA drawing components need points to be entered. A line, for example, has got a start and an end point.

For detailed information see command ConPoint.

4.1.1 Text input

We want to construct a simple line from (2, 1) to (4, 2). At first we run the command AddLine.
Now we enter the start point (2, 1) in the Command line as

Entering start point

Subsequently, we need to enter the end point. In order to use relative coordinates we change the Settings in the Command line menu to Relative coodinates

and enter the (relative) point (2, 1) as

Entering end point

The line from (2, 1) to (4, 2) is constructed.

4.1.2 Digitizing

Besides entering coordinate values alpha-numerically CADEMIA allows for graphical input via mouse. In order to define a point move the mouse to the desired position in a Geometry window and click the left mouse button. By default, the located point will be gridded, default grid point distance is 1.

Locate

We want to pick the endpoint (4, 2) of our existing line. Therefore we need to change the location method by pressing Locate in the Command line menu and switching to Pick.

Entering end point

Then we locate and pick the line's endpoint.

Picking point

The endpoint of our new line shall be digitized nearby the point (3.5, 0.5). We change the location mode to Digitize and locate the end point.

Digitizing point

The location mode currently set can be recognized by the current mouse cursor appearance.

Construction cursors

Intersection

Points can also be constructed on the basis of the intersection of 2 existing geometry objects. For detailed information see command ConPoint - Intersection.

Projection

Another method for constructing a point is to project an arbitrary point onto an existing line object (see ConPoint - Projection).

Recursive vector addition

In order to construct points on the basis of recursive vector addition use the Vectorial functionality. For detailed information see command ConPoint - Vectorial.