The setup is done, the brief is beside the keyboard, and it is time for the skeleton. This is the biggest drawing session of the course so far — and yet almost nothing in it is new. Walls, doors and windows are built entirely from Module 1 commands: RECTANGLE, OFFSET, TRIM, LINE and CIRCLE, aimed by snaps and typed distances. What IS new is the recipes — the professional combinations that turn those commands into a building.
Set WALLS current (glance at the layer dropdown — the mirror-check habit from Module 2) and begin.
The outer shell in ninety seconds
- 1REC, Enter — click a start point, type @8000,6000, Enter. That is the outside face of the building.
- 2O, Enter — type 230, Enter — click the rectangle, then click anywhere inside it. The inside face appears.
Two commands and the external walls exist: two rectangles perfectly parallel, exactly 230 apart, guaranteed — the wall trick from Module 1 at full building scale. Double-click the mouse wheel to zoom extents and admire the shell.
One EXPLODE, then partitions
Try to offset just the right-hand wall of the inner rectangle and you discover something: the WHOLE rectangle offsets, because RECTANGLE draws one joined object. For partition work you need its four lines separated. Type X (EXPLODE), Enter, click the inner rectangle, Enter. It looks identical — but it is now four independent lines. (Leave the outer rectangle joined; nothing needs to measure off it.)