AutoCAD Secrets EXPOSED—3D!

JEANNE AARHUS: Good morning. Welcome. For those who are repeating, this is my first time I've ever done a 3D class for the AutoCAD Secrets Exposed, so it should be fun.

The basic. My name is Jeanne Aarhus, and I live in Omaha, Nebraska. I basically work for myself, which has its good and bad sides. You can't blame anybody else, right?

I don't do much in PowerPoint. I basically am a consultant trainer. I make my living going around training people on how to be more productive with the software that you already have. so what I wanted to do with this class is just, as I started to get more involved in 3D, in teaching 3D, I started to realize there were some simple things that people just didn't know.

And so I'm going to start out a little simple, and then we're going to move into materials and lighting and all that stuff. So how many people here work in 3D every day? Good, quite a few of you. I like my class to be open. So if you have a question while we're going through, don't hesitate to ask. If it's going to be a long explanation, we'll just meet after.

And also, if you have a tip as we're going through, and you know a secret that I haven't exposed, let us know. Because that's what we're all here for. We're here to share. And there's no way that I could think of all the things that people don't know, right? So my goal is that you walk away with five things that you can use on a regular basis that you didn't know before you came in.

Also let me know if it's a good tip. I don't know which ones are good and which ones are bad. So I always kid around when I have rooms that are set up like this on both sides, that we have that oohs and we have the aahs. Right? Let me know if it's a good tip, because then I'll know to keep it in and not take it out for next year.

Well, there won't be a next year, so-- this is my AU. I may come back and visit, but I'm practicing retirement. And I'm finding that it's a good thing. Who knows what I'll get talked into by next year, but unofficially this is.

All right, so that's the extent of my PowerPoint. I just don't do PowerPoint. I believe in doing it in the software. So I hope that's a good thing and not a bad thing.

OK, we'll get out of here. Let's get out of this. All right, so in the handouts, for those of you who came in later, just so you know, I have embellished the handout a little bit more than I did with the original. As I started going through it and making sure that I had all my files ready and stuff like that, I started realizing that some people might not know how to do some of these things, so I added a bunch of step-by-steps into it. So just wait till you get home and download it. I don't have the newest one up there yet.

After I do the session, I have a tendency to tweak the handout based on what happened in the sessions anyway. So when you get home, the new ones will be up there. Just download them. I'll put them up there on Friday when I get home.

So in the beginning I put some definitions that you're going to need to know. One of the first things, I'm going to assume you all know AutoCAD fairly well. But the version of AutoCAD you're in does matter. Is there anybody here in 2015 or lower? How about 2016? 17? Good.

So most of everything I'm going to cover will work. There are going to be a few things in here that it's only going to work that way if it's in 2016 or 2017, so you guys will be good. All right. Nobody raised their hand for 2015 or lower, so you're either-- oh, one person. OK.

The reason I bring that up is because there was a huge change between '15 and '16. And between '15 and '16 they changed their rendering engine inside of AutoCAD, so it changed like almost everything about lighting. So it's just something that you want to be aware of. And the good news is it's way more simple now. Do you agree?

Those of you, who works with lighting at all? No? I do not claim to be an expert at lighting, because I'm not a cameraman, but if any of you guys are into photography, you'll be a really good lighting person because you get it. I always have to read about it and figure it out, and go, Yeah, I don't know what they're talking about. But I play with it till it works.

But yeah, lighting is definitely a skill that goes beyond our engineering training that we've had. They probably should give us some of that training to understand lighting, but those college days are way so far behind me, I can't even imagine. Some of you are young enough that you probably haven't been out of college for that long.

All right, so the first thing I look at is my workspace. I start off with the 3D modeling workspace. And I tweak it. Because there are definitely some things missing that you need on a regular basis. So I put the step-by-step as to how to do this. If you've never created a custom user interface ribbon or tool or however you're doing it, I did put some step-by-steps to kind of guide you through how to do it. I'm not going to walk through every step while we're doing that.

But basically I create a My Home ribbon. Because while the Home tab is nice, it's missing some obvious things. I found myself, in the newer releases, bouncing back and forth between Home and Solid way too often. And I also missed my old 3D tools, because some of these are just, I don't know, they're arranged in a more efficient panel than what I get on Solid.

So like look at how big those are? I mean, I'm sorry, but why didn't you just do it like this? Because they want to cram in as much stuff as you can. So, I just talked about a couple of things in the handout that I have to put on every single workspace that I'm working in 3D.

First of all, I'm going to go to My Home, and you'll notice that I added my properties panel. So you're just going to borrow this stuff from other ribbons, and you're just going to collect it and put it where you need it. So keep an eye open on that. There's probably going to be more stuff that you're going to miss, but the one I missed most was the Properties panel, and then on the Solids editing panel, if you look here on home, they don't give you-- there's nowhere on this one that I have to Fill It or Radius commands. They're just not there.

And I do a lot of the filleting of edges and things when I'm working in 3D, so on the My Home, what I did is I just borrowed those and stuck them on here. So that I would have them available. So just keep that in mind and watch for that. Watch for that flipping back and forth quite a bit. I just pointed out the ones that I always miss.

The other one I want to talk about, and like I said, there's no order to these. I try to keep them a little bit in order, but we're just going to bounce around between topics. So this whole section is kind of focusing on things on the interface that I want people to know about. How many of you guys are using your In Canvas view controls? Yes? The rest of you are not using these?

OK, this is like-- I can't even tell you how many times a day I use this. So let's talk about some of the things that are buried in there that you may not know. First of all, we probably all know that you've got your Visual Styles here that are delivered. We're all using those, I hope.

I'm a big fan of x-ray, because then I can see through it, but it still looks solid. So you'll find that a lot of my files, I work in x-ray quite a bit. Because then I can actually see the edges behind it that I want to get to. So when I start cycling through Faces and Edges, I want to be able to see the stuff in the background. And I just don't like the 2D wireframe. so I use x-ray quite a bit.

Now beyond that, if you look over here to this middle one, the view controls, this is where you can use these. I don't use this for the top front, right left, because I use the View Cube. But how many of you turn your View Cube off? Nobody-- a couple of you, OK?

Because some people just don't like it. It's like it bothers them being in a corner of the screen. That's fine. It took me awhile to get used to it being there. But you know you make it smaller, right? But if you don't like it, just use them over here. But if I'm using them over here, what you might want to do is make some custom views.

Have you use named views before? You'll find in a couple of my files, I'm going to use named views, just to get back to what I want really quickly. So when you're doing name views, just make sure that when you save your name views, I'll just save one. Call it demo. You can specify, I don't think I have any categories in this one, but you can tell what kind it is. It can be a recorded walk. Anything.

And I'll just define my window here, and I'll just make it, like there. All right. So now, once I have that saved, once I'm up here now, I have all my named or saved views quickly accessible from that point. Because who wants to open up a dialog if you don't want to, right? The goal is to never open a dialogue if you don't have to.

And I'm kind of a keyboard person, so if I do something by keying it in, and you don't know what I'm doing, holler at me. I can't help it. I'm a keyboard oriented. I always will be. I still use DOS commands. It is what it is, we can't change our personality types. They are-- I'm way too old to change those habits now.

So now, the other one that I want to talk about is this little dash here. A lot of people don't know that if you double click on that, it will switch to your last multiview window arrangement. And how do you get those window arrangements? You go to that view manager, right? And then it turns into a plus. And it does that on all of them. So when it's in the plus state, that means that it's a multiviewport arrangement. When you want to go back to a single viewport arrangement, you double click on it again.

And when you double click on that, it goes back to the last viewport arrangement that you used. so yeah, there's only one. You don't have ++. Then hopefully everybody knows now that you can modify these on the fly. Does everyone know that? So even though they deliver it, I like to have mine much narrower, because I typically work in this view. And then see, when I go back to my single, come back here, it's going to remember what I had.

Now I typically, honestly, would have three over here on the right. I work in isometric. I would assume most of us work in isometric 90% of the time. Because that's the easiest thing to do. So if you aren't using all of the things up here, investigate those. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Let me see if it did. Any of the ISOs, you said?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Hmmmm. I haven't run into that. I believe you, believe me I do. So I'm not sure-- OK, I'll have to watch for that. So did everybody hear that? OK. So I'll have to watch for that, thank you.

OK I have a little chip, come up later. I have a chip for you.

Well there's a couple of like, what did that just do things that even I can't explain. I could just tell you that's what it does. It's one of those AutoDesk things, you know. It's a special feature. That's what they'll tell you. That was a special feature.

OK, so the View Cube, I am of View Cube person. I make it smaller than this when I'm not presenting, and then I just use that. And a lot of people don't know that you can arrange this any way you want. So you can tip it in a non-isometric direction, and then up here, if you right click, you can save that current view as your home.

So depending on the model you're working on, you may not want it to look exactly a Southwest isometric. So now when I come up and I go to my southwest, if I pick home, it remembers what I want Home to be. I mean, Home can even be upside down if you want it to be. Hopefully not, but-- all right?

So just keep in mind that-- and I did real simple models here, because we're not going to be able to render anything too complex as we get going here because I don't want my computer to crash. So I'm a firm believer in the 3D, in the View Cube. I love the View Cube.

That's all right. Grips. Let me open up a different file here real quick. All right. Grips is something that you really have to be an expert at once you get into 3D. See, I don't like that angle because I can't see everything quite right. I prefer that. So you just have to save your own home views.

When it comes to Grips, hopefully everybody knows that when you select on this model, I've got a couple of things going on here. We'll talk about the interface. I've got this gizmo thing that shows up, right? Everybody know what a gizmo is? No is always a valid answer. I'm guessing there's someone in the room who doesn't know what a gizmo is. Everybody does?

OK, if you're not, not knowing it is why we're here. So don't ever hesitate to say, I did not know that. I will promise you that I will find out things at this conference that I did not know. And I've been doing this way too long. So I've been doing this longer than a couple of you have been alive.

So that's your gizmo. Now the gizmos may or may not show up, all right. But it has to do with Grips because you start working with your Grips. So I'm going to do gizmos in just a minute, but that's what this little thing is here. And it always shows up whenever you select a 3D solid. It'll show up on surfaces, meshes, solids, any of those.

Down here in the status bar, how many of you still miss your words? Don't you think they should just bring the text option back? I hate these icons. And I've tried to like them, but they suck. All right.

So down here you've got this little gizmo button. And when you-- it's weird because it's not blue. It's like multicolored when it's on and black when it's off. So if I have that turned off, and you select, you won't see your gizmo. So keep in mind, some of the stuff that I'm doing is very dependent on what I have turned on down here in my status bar.

I also pretty regularly use dynamic input, because it makes it easier when I'm using my gizmos to just key in the value that I want, and make sure that I'm getting just that value. So I'm a strong believer in dynamic input.

Now one of the things I'll tell you if you hate dynamic input, and I'll know you're in this room. Who hates it? Because you don't like all that crud following your cursor around, right? What you do is get in here and turn off all the stuff you don't like. So I don't need to know what my coordinate is unless I'm a surveyor, typically I don't care about that. So make sure that you come in and turn off all this stuff.

When you go under the settings, just say, show me just one thing instead of two. So trim down all the stuff that it gives you so that it's simpler. And then I think you'll actually like it. I usually do put that on one. But I'll do the defaults so that you'll see what it'll look like.

And then I made my tool tips bigger for you, and different colors and stuff. So that's one, and the other one is polar. I use polar a lot. I promised I was going to get to the 3D stuff. All right, when you're using Grips, when you first get this, you're only going to see the centroid grip at the base of the part. If you hold down your control key, and you select a face, then you will get just that face.

So one of the tricks that everybody needs to know is that control key. And if you're trying to get to the face behind it, you can do the space bar. I'll wait till I float on a different one. That'll get to the faces behind it. Whoops, got to hold the control key down.

And then once you've got that Grip, you'll notice when you hover that you get a couple of different options here. So when you're using these Grips, you need to hover to make sure what all your options are. Because they're going to give you different ways of moving that face, or different ways of manipulating that face.

A good way to show this one would be this face right here. If I select this face, and I hover, and I just move it, which is basically extended adjacent. See how it will move it, and it maintains that angled edge? And it becomes smaller.

If I say I want to move the face, it won't get-- it's kind of hard to grab it here. But now it's not getting smaller. It's not showing up very good. There, I'll bring it clear out here. So those are the options that you need to be aware of. And a lot of people pick their Grip so fast they don't even know there's options. So hover. Hover, hover, hover, hover.

And then triangulations, I'm going to be honest with you, I've never had a reason to do this. I don't know what it would be for. But it adds triangulation to the faces. Then I just have to hide those lines. So I'm not sure when I'd ever use that.

OK, edge grips. If you controlling and click an edge, then you get the edge only. And again, if you hover, you're going to get the same options basically. But you can go ahead and just move that edge. All right. And if I say, don't, just move that edge. It's kind of going to be the same in this example. It still moves that front edge because it has to. So control pick.

You can also control which faces that you're using based on filtering. If you look up here, you have in your selection, you have two buttons that we need to talk about. One of them is Culling, and the other one is the Filter. If you want to be able to control what you're selecting on really complex models, tell it that I only want to select edges. Don't even recognize faces.

And then as you come along, no matter where you click, it's only going to pick edges. All right, you won't have to worry about accidentally getting a face. But if you do get a face, how do you de-select? Shift, pick. So if you do accidentally pick something, it's just like in AutoCAD. Just shift, pick, and-- all right

The culling is what you do when you want to see through the part, and you want it to be able to get to the background stuff. So what they're talking about when they talk about culling is they're saying, I want to be able to get to the background stuff. So if I hover here, I'm going to put this back on. Let's go to face. And I pick here. If I-- of course, come on. It's not going to hover for me. I have to be in-- let me go pick extrude. And I'll pick extrude, control pick, and why is it not?

I got culling turned on, why is it not hovering? It should be going to the other panel. Why is it not? Let me think. I'm doing the space bar. OK, why is it not?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: No, I think this one is user error. But I'm trying to figure out what I have turned on that's keeping it from-- because I should be able to hit the space bar, and it will automatically find the panel below it. The face below it. Let me go back to face. And I need to be in some kind of command.

I don't know why my space bar is not-- hitting the space bar should make it go to the back edge. So from where I'm floating in the middle of the part there, it should recognize that it's got the sloped face and the back face. And you use the space bar to toggle between the ones you want. I'm going to try it on a different model in a minute. And then, that's what culling does. It means I want to be able to toggle and get to the exact one I want.

Because sometimes the entire face, in fact, this back face is completely behind another front face. So I have to be able to toggle to actually get to it, if I don't want to spin my model. Right? That's all culling does, is allow you access to those back faces.

I'll try another model here in a minute. A couple of options in the Fill It command that I want to talk about, that people overlook. All right, so I've added my Fill It command here. And if you look down at the command line, if we would just read our command line, we would be so much better off. But we know we don't.

And I'm going to check my radius here. OK, .25 will work. You have the chain and the loop option. All right, are you guys using this to make it simple? Or are you selecting every edge that you want to fill it?

And I put a couple examples in there. If I go ahead and I pick this one right here, all right? I just pick that edge. It's just going to make me manually go pick everything. If, and I don't know why that stays highlighted, just ignore it. It won't go away until you stop the command. If I come in and I do my Fill It again, and this time I say I want to do a chain.

If I select this edge, it goes all the way till it hits a turning point. That can save you an awful lot of time. And then you just finish it however you want to finish that Fill It that you're putting on there. So it will trace the entire edge.

Now the difference between that and Loop is that what Loop will do is, we'll go ahead and do our Fill It again. And this time I'll do a Loop, and I'll go ahead and I'll select this edge right here. Now see, there it picked the wrong one. If it picks the wrong one, I can do a space bar. Come on, OK, this one's-- OK, I'm going to just-- I'll use the command line one instead of the space bar.

I'll just go next. And it switches to the next face. If I don't like that one, I say next. In this case, I only have two. So you use the next option to just toggle between the two. And when it does the loop, what it's going to do is go all the way around the closed face. All right?

That is a really strange Fill It on the bottom there, but you get the idea, right? So the loop basically allows you-- we'll just pick this bottom edge here. Finds the edge, and fillets that off.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: So you want to pick a point. And now what it's going to, oh, I didn't-- sorry. Let me pick my loop. You want a chain or a loop? A loop. I picked the corner. It does. And then you're going to have to do next if it didn't get the one you wanted. OK? So, yes, you can pick the point.

So Loop is a fun thing. Don't overlook it. It can save you a lot of time. And when I'm watching, like I said, when I'm training people who've been playing in 3D for a little while, they're overlooking some of these buried options in some of the commands.

All right. I'm on tip number six. We're going to, I recommend that you use the sweep option rather than following the path command. Basically, if I want to sweep something, you're going to take an object, and you're going to sweep it around a path. The benefit of doing a sweep is that you can control it a little bit better because of the fact that you can define a base point, you can define the orientation.

All right, so rather than extruding along a path, sweep along a path. You'll get way more control. The command has more options. So for this one, just simply what we're going to do is, I highlighted my path there. If I just come in and I pick this--

Everybody's coughing because it's dry, right? Whose first AU is this? OK, Chapstick and water. Believe me, they'll be your two best friends. Because that's why your coughing. It's so dry here, you just can't even imagine. Drink three times the water you normally do.

OK, so if I want to sweep this, all right, I'm going to go over here. And I'm going to use this sweep command. I even like sweep better than loft, actually. But that again depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you just select this, and then you say, that's the object I want to sweep. And now it wants to know the path.

If I just pick anything, I'll come over here because my path is missing on that one. Select my object. And then we're just going to go ahead and pick my path without doing any command. Why is it not picking-- I am definitely having trouble with picking problems. And I don't know if it's this or not.

This notification, just so you know, I can't fix it. In 2017, they had a service pack, an update that came out like two or three weeks ago. This error is coming from that service pack. I've seen it all over out on Google. Nobody seems to know why it's coming up now. It didn't come up before the patch.

So if you did update 1 on 2017, you're getting this thing too. You can't make it go away. You can't turn off the notifications. You can't-- it just is there, so I'm ignoring it. That may be what's causing some of my cycling not to work. I'm not sure.

But anyway, I want to get my path here. For some reason, it's definitely not-- I'm trying to figure out what-- do I have selection cycling here? That's fine. I'm going to turn that one off. It's not liking that path. We all see the path, right? I even made it pink so you could see it. There it is. Why it's not finding it? There we go, maybe I just had to wake it up.

All right, so we'll do sweep, this shape. And we'll go ahead and put it along this, whoops, don't typo. This path. See if I can get to it. Had to be a little weird about picking it there. Now when it did that, initially what it's doing is taking the centroid of the shape and sweeping that along the path, which that's almost never going to be what you want it to do.

So make sure that when you're doing this that you're using the base point option. And I just showed you that I'm going to use that midpoint of that edge as my base point, and you have a base point and you have an alignment option. And that's what you should be looking at doing. So there's my part, and then I want to define my base point. And I'm going to define this midpoint right here.

Then when I come over here, I'm going to have to pick it weird again. All right. Then it's going to align it, potentially the way I want it if it centers it. If you don't want it centered, then pick the corner. But that allows you to control how you're sweeping that without having to move everything later. The centroid is the default, and it's almost never what you want. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: OK, let's try conceptual. Now I can't see it. I guess I could-- Oh, I deleted it. There, and we'll go to-- I hate wireframe though, but I'll try it. I'm just going to do the default. Nope. It found it, but it's not highlighting, so I'm not sure what's going on there. I think it has something to do with this performance, this visual--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: OK. And I know that x-ray tends to leave those blue edges behind, for whatever reason. I just ignore them anymore when it leaves it there. But, OK. So you can walk through the steps and the handout on that.

Now my favorite command of all time in 3D is probably press and pull. And I hope everybody is using press and pull, yes? Of course. Because that's the best-- who does not know what press and pull is?

OK, press and pull let's you be solid or whole, depending on how you work with it. All right. Press and pull is your first command you should ever learn in 3D, because it saves you knowing all these other things that you don't need to know. Press and pull let's you take your flat 2D graphics that most of us have worked with for years, and it allows you to take those and make those into 3D pretty quickly.

So press and pull is right here. And basically, if you select a object and you pull it, it just makes a solid, whichever direction. So again, you don't have to worry about negatives and positives and all that other stuff, right?

If you want to get in a region, then you come in and do your press and pull. If you float in a region, then it's going to see that one and pull that one up. So it does, you don't even have to do your union and subtraction and region commands any more. In the past, you used to have to make that a region, and then extrude it. With press and pull, forget all that. Just float, hover. Hovering is your friend.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Say that louder.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: I hardly ever use extrude, you're right. Who agrees with me that press and pull is better than extrude? OK, I agree. I think press and pull is easier. Now a couple of things to know about press and pull is, when you use it, how do I control whether it adds or subtracts?

So the first thing I'm going to do is take this rectangle, and I'm just going to bring it up. Let's see what diff-- is it one? Nope. Sorry, I forgot my number on this one. I'm just going to press and pull and not worry about what the size is.

OK, now what I did is I pre-drew those circles, but all I did was I turned on my dynamic UCS, right? If you come down here, I absolutely hate these icons because no matter what they never look right. There it is, dynamic UCS is turned on.

So this is another tip that you need to know about. When you're drawing anything 2D, if you hover, watch my UCS icon. Right now I'm on the floor. Right? My x and y is on the floor. So if I start drawing, I'm on the floor. I'll do a circle because it's easier. If I hover on the top, it stays the same. If I hover on the side, it changed. Right?

So that's what dynamic UCS will do. It will automatically align to the surface or face that you're aligned to, and let you draw the circle. So all I did ahead of time was draw a couple of circles.

Now if I use press and pull on this one, see I'm flipping back and forth again. And I select the circle, then what it's going to do is it's going to make it a solid. Because I select the edge of the object. All right.

If I do the press and pull, and I hover inside the circle, and I pull it through, it becomes a hole. All right. So it's whether you pick the edge or float in the middle. And that's how you'll get your hole, so if I hover in the middle and pull it through, then I get my holes.

All right. And everybody knows you can shift wheel and dynamically just rotate your view all the time, right? OK.

Another tip that I just recently learned is I was trying to put a series of holes in a disk. And no, unfortunately, you can't make it an associative array, and then use press and pull. You should be able to do that. Do you agree? Yes, so please help me complain. For the love of God. We've had the associative array for how many years now? And I still can't press and pull it? Seriously.

So what I did find out though, is that you can select the multiple holes, even though they're not associated. If I do press and pull, and it looks like you can't pick more than one. But if you do press and pull, and you shift-- OK, come on, I'm pretty sure it was shift. Let me double check.

Yeah, shift key. So I'm going to hold the shift key down. Oh, I was holding the control key down. Sorry. If I do this, I can pick multiple holes. And I can push them through. So you don't have to do them one at a time. All right. Is that a new one? I haven't gotten an ooh or aah yet. Has this been all old stuff? I'm trying to get to the more complex stuff.

And, of course, with press and pull, if you have a region like this, like walls or whatever, if you're doing architectural, you just hover in the middle, and it'll pull the whole thing up, right? So look how quick you can turn that 2D plan into 3D.

Now if you are really doing architecture, I'm going to pray that you're in Revit or AutoCAD Architecture, but if you're not, it's still possible. I'm going to skip that one. Keep track of my time here. Ignore the time there. That's Omaha time. I promise you it's not 10:30, it's only 8:30.

Selecting-- let's see if this model will work a little bit better. Selecting sub-objects. So I just made a little bit more complex part, and I want to hover, and I want to select things. So now if I go ahead and I select here. Let's do press and pull. All right. If I shift, I can't believe this is not working.

I have no idea why it's not. My culling is turned on, and I'm not using a filter. But I'm hovering, and it's not going to the other. I don't, let me see, press and hold. Yeah, control. It's just not-- you should be able to space bar. I promise you when you go home, it'll work. All right, if you use the space bar, it will let you go through the culling and find the other options.

The only thing I can think is I don't think this one has, yeah, I've got my history turned on on this one. So nope, I don't on this one. So that makes me think of another tip as far as your solid history. When you're creating a part, you want to have solid history turned on during the initial design of it. What solid history allows you to do is it allows you to come in and modify the original objects that created your part.

So if I open up the one that has history turned on. There, we'll do this one. Because I know this one has solid history. So when I select this, see over here under properties? My history is set to record. So when I was developing this part, I was recording all my steps.

What that gives you is that gives you the opportunity of coming in and selecting the inside part, and it'll give you grips. If you notice on this other one, I'm going to be in trouble here with all these parts being open. If I control pick this one, see I don't get those grips. Because when I did this one, my history was set to none. It wasn't recording my steps.

So I really can't edit this one as well as I should be able to by having the solid history. So I control pick, and now I can actually change this pretty easily. Oops, if I don't snap to something accidentally. Turn off my F3 here. And it's pretty easy to come in and modify after the fact.

So I can't imagine why you would turn your history off, except once you know your parts developed, maybe you don't care about the next thing that you want to record. And it is off by default. So turn your solid history on. Here you can see my original little circle is still sitting there too.

So solid history lets you come in and modify any of those with grips. I can modify the length, I can modify the radius.

This is an interesting-- if you take a part, and select several of those parts. When you have a really complex 3D model, is everybody aware that if you highlight just part of your model, and you work with the View Cube, that it will automatically zoom to-- what the heck? It should be.

See, that's not working either. You should be able to-- when you do your wheel, it isolates it, right? What is going on with my display? I've definitely got a video card problem going on here. But see, normally when I was doing this, it's a way to isolate that part of your model. And then when you shift rotate, the rest of the model goes away. And if you go up here and do top, it zooms to just that selected part.

Some of you know what it's supposed to be doing, and I apologize. I don't-- I'm about ready to exit AutoCAD and come back in. All right, so shift wheel, if you isolate, if you have just part of it selected is a way for you to just look at what you want while you're changing your view and spinning around.

We already talked about the selection filters. Point filters. Point filters is a super old concept that is still here. But point filters, does anybody here still use point filters? It's probably 20 years old, if not older. What point filter-- and I just did a simple little 2D example to show you what it's doing.

When I use point filters, it's on my shift right click menu. It's right here. It lets you define a value that you want to lock. So let's say I was doing something simple. And I just want to draw a circle. If I'm going to draw a circle, but I want this circle to be lined up with these z value of a specific-- like I'm going to pick the midpoint of this red box. All right.

So I'm going to do a shift right click, point filter. And I want to lock to the z value of the point that I'm about to snap to. So I'll say point z, and then, oop, let me turn on my snaps again. And I'll snap to the midpoint of that box. So what I've just done is I've locked my z value for my circle to that point. Doesn't matter where I come in and draw, it's going to be locked to that point.

Of course, it would be nice if I had it on my-- point filter z here. And I'll try to draw somewhere over in here, so maybe you can see it. Don't snap accidentally. OK, I did. Did you see me accidentally get that snap in there?

Point filter z. I'll go to here, turn off my O snap so I know I'm not snapping. And no matter where I'm at over here, I can be up here. See how it's locked in to that point? So it's lined up with that point.

What happened before when it didn't work and it put me back on the floor, was I accidentally hovered and caught the central, the center snap there, which then overrode my point z. So when you're doing this, you really want-- I turn my o snaps off, so that I don't accidentally snap to something else.

But this allows me to come in here now, and if I changed my-- let's get rid of this one so you can actually see it. If I came in, and I just drew a box over here. It should have been set. Box, box, box. There we go. Point z. And I just draw right in here. It's on the floor.

If I do, oops, recall my command here. Point z to the top here. Oop, might nee my o snap there. Turn off my o snap, come back over here. As long as I don't snap to anything, I'm lined up with the top.

So this allows you to say. I need to draw equal with that plane that's over there. All right?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: You could set your elevation. You could also just use a UCS. Or a gizmo. But there's times when I need this rather than a gizmo to lock down. There's always more than one way to do this, but I think point filters is overlooked.

OK, invisible edges on a face. OK, when you're selecting this part, or these-- now this is not a solid. These are 3D faces. This is a command that only works on 3D faces. It will not work on a 3D solid, because a 3D solid, this whole thing would be one part. So there would be multiple faces that would have those lines.