Inventor Has it Right
I had a tech support issue last week on Inventor which really drove home the issue of understanding projecting reference geometry. When you create sketches in Inventor they are "free-floating" on the work plane unless they are constrained to either the center point or the two axes. The problem is that you can't constrain to the center point or the two axes unless you first select the Project Geometry tool and then select the desired reference item.
Why did Autodesk design it to work that way? Well, the way I see it, it makes perfect sense. You usually only need to constrain the first (base) sketch to the reference geometry. Additional sketches can be constrained to the first feature's geometry. By requiring the user to project reference geometry into the sketch the user is forced to only use what he/she needs. This keeps the file size down and makes the sketches more manageable. [an error occurred while processing this directive] Other CAD packages will automatically project the axes, center point and work planes onto any new sketches. This means that as your model progresses, you are dragging all that excess reference geometry behind you like a sack of bricks, slowing down your regens, bloating your file, and making the whole process that much more cumbersome.
Inventor has it right...only project and constrain to the reference geomety you need.
Can't wait to see what R6 has in store...
Elise Moss is President of the Silicon Valley AutoCAD Power Users
PO Box 62515
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
www.power.org
Elise Moss
Moss Designs
Los Gatos, CA 95033
www.mossdesigns.com
For more info, go to www.cadvantage.net/sketchcalc.asp.
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