During many manipulations of a mesh, you may want to reproduce a certain behavior along an axis, which means that you will need a solution for axial or central symmetry. Although AutoCAD doesn’t have a specific tool for editing at both sides of an axis, there are certain tricks that will do the job for many cases.
The most obvious case is when we need to move faces on the same direction. That’s pretty easy, since we just need to select these elements and move them.
However, other situations may get trickier, and that’s when we need to be a little smart and operate in a different way. If we want to move or enlarge objects in opposite locations, we can use the Scale Gizmo. The whole point here is how to locate the Gizmo to the center of the selection. We’ll just use snaps! Mid Between Two Points is maybe the newest snap (introduced many versions ago), and was just a blessing. Do you remember when we had to draw an auxiliary line and snap to its midpoint, and then delete it? Ouch!
Once you have relocated the Gizmo to the new position, the Scale option will do the job, if you move mainly along the axis that is somehow normal to the selections. You could also work with the whole plane in the Gizmo too, depending on what you want to achieve.
In this example, the selection of the Mid Between Two Points is done by clicking on the grips in both faces.
Then, just click and drag the axis, and see the changes in the model. Yeah... it's AutoCAD!
If you have more than a face selected on each side, you will need opposite points that when snapped with Mid Between Two Points, will deliver the real center of the whole selection. The image below shows one of the possible options.
This looks so good, that I may try to do something else. Why not select two more faces along a central symmetry, and apply the same process along the Z axis? Here are the results. Have fun and see you in the next post!
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