Today I wanted to take a quick look at a redone feature that might make a case for the #1 enhancement in SolidWorks 2010.
Many of us, I would imagine, at one time or another struggled with getting reference planes to come in the right way in previous versions. Maybe we have had to add a bunch of really unnecessary sketches to our feature tree in order accomplish what we were hoping to get. That will change with SolidWorks 2010 as the entire Reference Plane PropertyManager has been completely revamped in order to be more “user friendly” and intuitive.
As you can see below you will notice a difference in the interface as soon as you launch the command. The picture on the left is the 2009 interface while the picture on the right is the 2010 interface.
So right away you are being asked to start selecting some references so that SolidWorks can begin thinking about what kind of plane you are hoping to get. If you would select a flat surface it will automatically select the distance option which would result in a plane a set distance from the surface you selected. You can also select 2 circular surfaces and get a resulting tangency plane as show below.
If you notice in the picture above you will see that it says in the “Message” box that it is highlighted in green and says “Fully defined”. However, when you select lets say a 3rd reference that does not work with the 1st 2 the “Message” box not turns red and tells you that you have an error as shown below.
You can see in the picture below that it is extremely easy now to flip the tangency back and forth. Do you remember how much of a pain it is to do this in previous releases.
You can select edges for plane references as shown below.
And even vertex points as shown below.
All in all this is an awesome improvement. There has been many times in my years running SolidWorks that I have been asked by other users about how to create a plane the right way. Now this is hard but definitely a good question because of some of the steps that were needed to do this in previous releases. Again, this is a great improvement which I am sure you will really enjoy!
Jason,
Still no way to tell it which side is which on the plane? That, to me, is the critical element that is missing from plane definition. Flipping planes is a flipping problem!
hi jerry,
thanks for leaving the comment. i might be missing something obvious here but what would be the need of knowing which side of the plane is which? you should be able to go either way off of a plane no matter what you are doing. please give me some more details and what you were hoping to see.
thanks again!
Jason,
If I have a sketch on a plane or face and decide to move it or copy it to a new plane, there is a 50-50 chance that it will end up mirrored, because the normal for the plane is facing the wrong direction. If we could control the orientation of the plane, this wouldn’t be a problem.
thanks for the reply jerry!
that makes sense to me now. i can definitely see where that would be a benefit. maybe this is something that solidworks needs to think about. if not being able to specify a side of a plane maybe they could give some orientation options.
Jerry is absolutely right. The sense of the plane is extremely important. Sometimes in some circumstances planes will flip their normal unexpectedly. If there is a sketch on the plane, as Jerry says, it will be mirrored.
This is fallout from using Euler Angles (rotation matrix math) instead of quaternion math for keeping things oriented in SW. The gamers have figured this out long ago. Rotation matrices can’t deal with singularities and so will flip unexpectedly.
awesome… thanks a lot. i have the same doubt. brilliant…. thanks for posting the answer.
I used to be able to make a reference plane “Normal To” a curve. It would kick the plane flat to the end of a curve so my plane would then be perpendicular to the end point of the curve. Where did that feature go to in 2011?
Solidworks is for 3rd graders. Pro/Engineer is for real men.