When the Teacher Becomes the Student Watch Video here David Cohn Every family has holiday traditions. For the past two decades, one of the traditions at my house has included the family putting up with me during Thanksgiving as I put the fi nal touches on my presentations for Autodesk University. Don’t get me wrong—I love attending and teaching at AU. It is one of the highpoints of my year. But preparing to speak in front of a room full of already- knowledgeable AutoCAD users is often nerve- wracking. Is the material I’m about to present too basic, too advanced, or just right? vertical even when the object being dimensioned was at an angle—two hands went up. At that moment, I was explaining how to use object snap and object snap tracking to make sure that the dimension aligned perfectly horizontal or vertical. (I actually explain this exact method in one of the AutoCAD 2016 CADLearning lessons: “Creating Linear Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions.”) This year in particular was challenging. My two classes both addressed functions that have been in the software seemingly forever, but which have changed dramatically this year. One class dealt with creating photorealistic renderings in AutoCAD as the result of a totally new rendering engine. The other class covered dimensioning in AutoCAD using a completely revamped DIM command. The rendering class was a blur as I tried to cover all aspects of lighting, materials, camera placement, and output control in a mere 60 minutes. There are so many tips and tricks to cover when it comes to something like rendering, which is both technical and artistic. But the dimensioning class essentially allowed 60 minutes to cover a single command— the new DIM command in AutoCAD 2016. Was there really enough there to keep the attention of 158 people for a full hour? 14 I need not have worried. Ten minutes into the class, while still talking about using the new DIM command to create linear dimensions—specifi cally how to force a dimension to be either horizontal or www.cadlearning.com The fi rst student asked, “Why don’t you just turn on Ortho mode?” An excellent suggestion. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Ortho mode, which forces lines to be either horizontal or vertical, is a feature that has been in AutoCAD almost from the beginning, yet after 30 years of using AutoCAD, I had neglected to even mention this as a viable method for ensuring that a given dimension aligned with the X- or Y-axis.