AutoCAD® 2012 FOR DUMMIES®

Arraying Associatively

Things used to be so simple, back around … oh, AutoCAD 2011. ARRAY was unequivocally a modifying command, just like COPY or ROTATE. You filled in values in a dialog box, and after a bit of tweaking, you ended up with multiple copies of the source objects, neatly arranged in geometric patterns: either in evenly spaced rows and columns, or evenly distributed radially about a center point. Then Autodesk's programmers decided old-fashioned arrays weren't enough. They took the old ARRAY command into the lab, wired electrodes to its brain and threw the switch — and up rose the new super ARRAY!

Comparing the old and new ARRAY commands

The results of using the new ARRAY command are so different from those you got in previous releases that I really wish they'd given it a new name. I'm going to do my best to clarify the muddy waters, so here's the terminology I'm using in this book:

• ARRAY: The new AutoCAD 2012 command for creating associative and non-associative rectangular, polar, path and 3D arrays of existing objects. The ARRAYRECT, ARRAYPATH and ARRAYPOLAR are subsets of the ARRAY command.
• –ARRAY: The command-prompt version of the original ARRAY command present in AutoCAD for the last twenty years. This version only creates what I refer to as “simple” arrays.
• Associative array: New-in-2012 object type created as a single object from separate source objects. Associative arrays (think of them as dynamic arrays) ignore the source object layers and are created on ...