Dimensions, drawing units, layout? n00b help

hi. i feel stupid but i just dont understand how to set this up. everyone suggests drawing in true size. I'm down, but HOW?? basically im drawing a disk with a diameter of .5 inches ( don't ask me why, it's an assignment). ive set my units to inches, take the circle tool, draw it and it appears to be an octogon. I'm assuming i'm doing something wrong here with units but i just dontunderstand and i cant find any help. all tutorials that i've found jump straight from the no brainer UI stuff to the drawing tools without ever explaining how to set things up. I've used older versions in the past and i know theres something about limits that i might have to play with.

Any minute now i just might bust back out the title block and compass set... at least i'll make some progress that way. any help would be greatly appreciated

At the command line set VIEWRES to 1000. Regen. Does your circle appear to more round and less of a polygon?

Type LIMITS at the command line. What are the settings? Probably something like lower left corner 0.00,0.00 and upper right corner 12.00, 9.00? A disk with a half-inch diameter will have no problem fitting into a space this size. Now if it were a 5 foot diameter then setting your limits to 0.00,0.00 and 72.00,72.00 would be fine.

Yes, do draw everything FULL SIZE in model space. When done switch to a Layout, create a Viewport and then scale the viewport. We can cover all this later.

Go forth and CAD. Now!

ive put the res even higher than 1000 which makes it a circle again. thanks for that. I've played around with the limits and theyre now at 0,0 12,12.

The problem wasnt that the circle didnt fit within the grid. It seems now everything is working okay, but that autocad is just very "small stuff"-unfriendly. the grid units apparently can not be made smaller than .5 inches( even tho ive tried to set the settings to .1 ), which is ridiculous because i can technically fit the entire front view of this disk in a single grid box. also, if i were to have to dimension this drawing the arrow heads would completely dwarf my drawing. anything i'm missing here?

Thanks for the help. I think im going to stop wasting time and do this assignment by hand, but i'll definitely have another go at it for next week's assignment. Thanks again for your help

Why do you even have grid on in the first place? Are you using Snap too?

I do my dimensioning in my layout. Some people elect to dimension in model space using a feature called annotative scaling. Although I've tried it, understand it, and could make a case for its use in a limited set of circumstances I do not use it.

You do realize that arrowheads, like many other aspects of dimensioning, can be controlled in your Dimension Styles don't you?

actually no, but when i read your post i looked up annotation styles and am definitely taking baby steps. So you recommend dimensioning in the layout? does it work the same way? ill look into that now

No, I'm not recommending anything. It is up to the user to determine what works best for them. Heck, we still have people that drawing everything in model space "to scale" just as one would do on the board and then scale the drawing down to fit on their paper when it comes time to plot.

I dimension in my layout to avoid having to deal with annotative scaling and because that's the way I was taught. One advantage is not having to worry about scale lists. Dimensioning in a layout requires the dimensions to be associative too.