- [Instructor] We're staying in our interface.DWG file.
And what I want to show you now is a really cool
piece of functionality in AutoCAD.
It's known as Dynamic Input.
And what it allows you to do is
actually look at your crosshair,
which you can see there moving around
in the drawing area as I move the mouse,
and the functionality of it is,
you actually have the information
on the crosshair as you work.
Now I've mentioned the command line in the previous video,
what'll happen is you can work with the dynamic input
and the command line in tandem
developing your drawings in AutoCAD.
But before we look at dynamic input
sometimes known as DYNMODE,
you need to just have a look at your status bar
bottom right of the screen.
So we've got various icons available to us there.
You can see all our drafting settings.
If you go all the way along
to the little three lines at the end and click
that allows you to customize your status bar.
So if I click on Customization,
you can see that I've got various tools
lots of them available to me.
About a quarter of the way down from the top.
I've got Dynamic Input, just click on it
and you'll see a little tick appears next to it, like say.
Come down to the little three lines,
the Customization icon again
and click against close the menu.
So Dynamic Input is on by default in AutoCAD
when you start it up in the later versions,
and it's this little icon here on your status bar.
So there's DYNMODE, Dynamic Input, and it's on.
So if I now go up to the Line command here in the draw panel
and I click on the Line command
and come into the drawing area,
you can see, I get the prompt next to my crosshair,
asking me to specify the first point.
You can see it there like,
so as I move the crosshair around.
You'll also notice down on the command line,
you can see that my Line command has kicked in as well.
So you can see, you can work in tandem
with command line and dynamic input,
but here's the clever bit.
If I now click somewhere in the drawing
and drag on drawing my line, there's my first line segment.
All of that dynamic input information
is there on the screen.
The length of the line, the angle of the line
from the horizontal zero line.
And it's also prompted me to specify the next point.
So I can just type in values
such as say 11,000 in this case.
And then if I just tab,
just using the tab key on the keyboard,
I can now put in an angle of 45 degrees there and tab again.
And can you see, it's locked a distance of 11,000
for the line and an angle of 45 degrees.
That's what dynamic inputs all about.
You're doing it all on the screen
in front of you like a heads up display,
the whole idea of dynamic input
is it stops you reading the subtitles.
You've always watched a foreign movie,
and what have you done?
You've looked at the subtitles to understand
what they're saying rather than concentrate
on the action in the movie itself.
That's exactly what dynamic input is doing for you.
You're seeing the action heads up while you're drafting
rather than having to look at the command line all the time.
I'll just hit escape a couple of times now
just to cancel the Line command,
and you can see there, the cancel pops up
on the command line again at the bottom of the screen.
And what's really nice is it fades away as well,
which is quite a nice feature of AutoCAD.
So what happens if Dynamic Input is switched off?
Well, let's go down there now to DYNMODE.
There it is there.
If I click on it, it goes gray.
Can you see that blue, gray.
gray is off, blue is on.
So if I click on it and it's gray and I now type in line,
watch what happens,
it appears on the command line.
I press Enter,
and now I'm working from command line only.
And as I move my crosshair around
I haven't got my distance or my angle anymore.
So dynamic input is incredibly useful.
I'll just hit escape a couple of times to cancel
the line command again
and I'll switch DYNMODE or dynamic input
back on again there like say.
Now one more thing before we leave dynamic input,
if I right click over that icon
and select dynamic input settings that pops up,
I can go in and I can set all of my dynamic input settings
in the Drafting Setting style of box.
There's the Dynamic Input tab, Drafting Settings there.
I can enable Pointer Input, change the colors,
the settings and so on.
And so I will say that I've never changed
my Dynamic Input settings in all the time
they've been available in AutoCAD.
So I'm going to click on, cancel there
and just leave all the default settings
running as I normally do when I work in my AutoCAD drawings
but that's dynamic input in AutoCAD
for you to use while you're drafting.