MikeHenry said:
But that addresses how the part space is first presented to the user. Do any of them allow you to change the part orientation after the design is committed without having to do a Boolean operation? For example, say that the starting feature for a part is sketched on the X-Y plane and it is later desired to base it on the Y-Z plane or any other plane. Do any of the main CAD programs allow one to make that change without using a Boolean operation? Is it difficult to program such a feature?
Along the same lines it would be really handy to allow the user to change the plane or surface to which a feature sketch is applied.
From
my knothole on the universe, the
coordinate system in which I am designing a part is really an analog of the
coordinate system of the machine tool upon which it will be manufactured
or some
end product coordinate system. The issue here is less one of making
sketches on
planes of specific orientation as that is fairly easy to handle in the context of
reference plane definition assignment. The greater challenge lies with
coordination of datums and other reference points and the true
killer of
referenced part geometry including
Project to Sketch references.
At the most trivial level, one can open
Sketch <X>, perform a
Select All and
Copy, exit
Sketch <X>, open
Sketch <Y>,
Paste the geometry, dimension everything, and exit
Sketch <Y>. You are just likely to spend a lot of time re-establishing your
constraints and
dimensional relationships.
One thing you can
always do is to
rename the
planes and
axis. Obviously, if you want the
XY-Plane to become the
YZ-Plane, you are going to have to use an
intermediate name to "hold place" while you rename the other planes. The same is true of the cardinal
axis. The only fly in the ointment in this is that your
output data will still be formatted to the default condition.
Does any of this help?
