Pst, pst… come closer. I am about to give you the key to one of the few remaining SolidWorks mysteries.
You see, in the process of building the City of SolidWorks, its architects and constructors created huge blueprints for all the buildings, large maps for all the avenues and thick address books for all its citizens. These blueprints, maps and address books can be found now in:
Very little remains uncharted in the SolidWorks City, but this has not stopped a few very passionate archaeologists and explorers to dig deeper for answers to the handful of questions that remain mysteries. Let me give you some of their names: Edward Eaton, Charles Culp, Anna Woods, Mark Biasotti and Mike Wilson.
One of the most intriguing SolidWorks enigmas left is how the positive and/or negative directions of a plane are determined. Who decides which “face” of a plane is the front (green) and which one is the back (red) one?
You know, this is really, really important; for a quick example just think about the direction an extruded feature will expand towards. Don’t you want to be able to control that when the design intent changes? How many times have you changed a feature in the tree, only to have its children crying about the loss of direction? And you know what happens when a child gets disoriented? It covers himself in ketchup and mustard (feature tree errors and warnings), making the laundry bill quite expensive.
Fortunately, once a year all these archaeologists and explorers get together and share their findings. They call this event “SolidWorks World“. I was lucky enough to be there when Charles Culp displayed selected pieces of the treasures he unearthed. While he shone light on all the big diamonds, sapphires and rubies in his presentation, he kept tossing from time to time little sparkling gems to his audience. Imagine my surprise when I caught such a little gem and found out that can be used as a potential key to the plane question. Like any precious stone, it cannot be described in words, you have to see it with your own eyes.
Watch this:
Related posts tagged with: direction, normal, normal direction, plane, plane direction, Sketch, SolidWorks
12 Comments (+add yours?)
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Good afternoon Alin,
Thanks for sharing this, seeing things like this makes me wonder how many other simple things like this I don’t know
Later,
John
I am with you here, John. These little things are the ones I like the most.
Charles Culp delivered a magnificent presentation at SWW2012, but the things I appreciated the most were 2 apparently “simple” tips that provided answers to old questions.
I have another article pending describing the second tech tip and, I am sure, you will like it as much as I did.
Thanks for that. Good info.
Nice video, thanks for creating it.
Hi Alin,
I submitted “Turning sketches upside-down on planes” Tech-tip long ago to Javelin/SWx Tech News Letter and was published (Got a gift certificate too).
Summary of it:
If you want to turn a sketch upside-down on a plane;
1. Edit the sketch plane
2. Select any perpendicular plane
3. Then again edit the sketch plane (new)
4. Select the old sketch plane.
This method is very useful if you work with derived sketches because most of the times the derived sketch is facing the wrong direction.
Thanks Michael, I was not aware of this workflow. Nice.
That being said, you can use the Modify tool to flip any sketch at will.
Hi Alin,
I’m wondering if you get my point properly.
Please check the uploaded file in my personal website:
http://www.solidcadworks.com/temp-files.html
If you make a derived sketch of the sketch= “A” on the Right Plane you will get sketch= “B” (try yourself and you will get the result of sketch= “B” NOT sketch= “C”)
The method I describe is; from the sketch= “A” how to get the result of sketch= “C”
Thanks for making that nice model, Michael. I am still not sure I understand why you state that the Modify Sketch Tool would not work.
Please watch this video and advise:
Thanks for explaining Alin.
When was this introduced to SWx? I had been using my old method throughout all this time.
I mostly apply this flipping when my offset sketch entities, offset to the wrong side. Next time must try your method.
Thanks again Alin.
Thanks for the feedback Michael. I will create a more polished video and a new article discussing this tool.
Let me ask you something else. Do you find the content of this blog valuable? Do you find it easy to navigate and find the relevant information?
I just saw your post in Linked-in. I haven’t visited this blog much.
One more reason to keep an eye on this blog. You might find more little things that you were unaware of and can save a lot of time in the long run.