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Monday, April 16, 2012

CATCHING A PLANE TO WORK

Interesting post from:Shades of Grey: CATCHING A PLANE TO WORK:

Nice writeup by Andy Milburn

This is really basic stuff, but for some reason it never really lodged itself properly in my active memory (what's left of it)

Occasionally I might "show the work plane" especially when in a 3d view, just to make sure I'm working on the right one.  But I never got into the habit of resetting the grid and snapping to it, which could actually be quite useful at times.



Recently I've been working on a project where there are two grids at 45 degrees to each other.  I found myself doing things like drawing a rectangular floor slab, then rotating it 45 degrees.  Not a problem really, but why didn't it occur to me to rotate the grid.  Worse still I seem to remember telling a seasoned autocad user during a training session that Revit doesn't really have an equivalent to the UCS.  There's some truth to that, because the UCS is a much more elaborate system, but why didn't I think of demonstrating "rotate work plane" ?



I hope other people have similar blind-spots because it's a bit worrying when you discover that you are a bit hazy about such basic functionality of your favourite software package.  So I was motivated to establish that each view remembers its workplane settings when you close and re-open a project.  Also good to know that multiple views of the same level have independent work plane settings.  Also stumbled on an interesting fact with nor real use.  If you select the workplane in a plan view, then jump to another plan view you can temporarily see both workplanes at once.



The fourth picture shows something I should probably also consider doing more often.  Set the workplane to the face of a wall, adjust the grid size & position.  Draw model lines, create openings, add sweeps, model in place, whatever.  Also rather horrifying is the fact that I don't remember using the automatic radius option before when drawing a rectangle.



Needless to say this also works for walls drawn with the rectangle tool, or line by line.  Not that I am ever likely to design a building like this.



Having not really explored this option before, I was curious to see how it worked with other tools.  I was imagining hexagons with rounded corners, but of course this is not how it works.  For polygons, the radius option has a completely different effect, controlling the size of the whole shape (inscribed or circumscribed)  And for a 3 point curve it seems to have no effect at all, even though it is possible to check the box.  I had hoped that it might fillet the corners when forming an arc between the ends of two walls, but not so.  You just tick the box and nothing happens at all.

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