Thursday, December 16, 2010

Dept. of Subtle - Reference Plane Orientation

It's a good idea to become familiar with how reference planes define a work plane for your solid/void forms. It isn't obvious at first or perhaps without digging in for awhile either. I've written about Reference Planes a few times in the past.

Once Upon a Reference Plane
Once Upon a Workplane - Seeing is Believing
Is You Is or Is You Ain't
IsReference Setting - Weak and Strong

There is a head and tail, the head is where the Reference Plane name appears. There is a difference between the Reference Planes you find in a template and the ones you create by sketching them. Check out the other posts (and the embedded video here) for more on that difference.

I created the following VIDEO to demonstrate what prompted me to make it, that mirroring a reference plane isn't a good idea. At least it isn't a good idea if you have no idea what the outcome is when you do choose to do it. The orientation of the reference plane is reversed when you use the mirror tool in addition to being copied/mirrored. If you want to control the work plane orientation then use the Copy tool instead.


3 comments:

Yves Gravelin said...

You can also use the rotate tool.
By doing so, you can reverse the direction without losing the plan's name.

Steve said...

or just drag end over end to reverse orientation. Careful if solid/void forms are hosted though. They get "flipped" over and if they are constrained it will create some "pain".

Anonymous said...

If you create the reference plan from bottom/up, the positive will be on the left side. Top/down, the positive will be on the right side.

Glen Walson
Interface Engineering