Crosshairs in 3D

If you’re planning to do any 3D modeling — and you should be, if you’re using AutoCAD 2007— set up the crosshair cursor for 3D so you’ll know which way is up. Use the Options command, and click the 3D Modeling tab.

Select Show Z Axis In Crosshairs. Doing so adds the third “up” dimension to the crosshairs; it appears in blue. There is a method to the madness of color coding. Anyone who knows computers knows that monitors use RGB color space. Painters often get confused because they learned that yellow is a primary color, and it is — at

least, for the subtractive color you see with reflected light (as in paint on a canvas). Computer monitors shine light in your eyes, so they use additive color,

which is an entirely different animal. But we digress.

The mnemonic, or way to remember it, is RGB=XYZ — red represents the X axis, green for Y, and blue for Z. The UCS icon is fatter and has conical arrowheads on the axis tips by default, but observe that it follows the same hard and fast color-coding rules.

You might choose to label the axes on the crosshairs (in Options), but once you get the color mnemonic, doing so will be overkill. Before closing the 3D Modeling tab of the Options dialog, select Show Z Field For Pointer Input. This option is helpful if you ever want to key in Z coordinates on screen using dynamic input, but point input must also be enabled

in Drafting Settings.

CARI

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Crosshairs in 3D