MY 3D SOLIDS WILL NOT ALIGN

Aerospace Desk
Aerospace Desk
in 3D Modeling

Hi Everyone,

I am a newbie to this forum.

I have this pet hate of mine, my Murphy's Law Alclad (tm) Plate with two existing flanges and the desire to put two stiffening flanges between the flanges with the mounting holes. It was originally created in NanoCAD 5.0, then went to AutoCAD 2015, then CorelCAD 2015 and now I am here with it. I am at advanced-beginner level with CAD so still very much in 2D drafting board intuitive mode. Sorry, if I appear to be a pain.

My current problem is that, in any of these applications including BricsCAD, I am having issues with drawing on the same plane with the result that my stiffening flanges and indeed my curvilinear corner fillet(s) have all gone the way of Voyager  I and II.  They are out there but I cannot bring them back to mother earth (the plate).

In the attached DWG file, there is a plate, two stiffening flanges and one curvilinear fillet floating around in the ether.  That little fillet is pretty special to me because it took me a lot of time to make.

I have one of the flanges near the plate and with ESNAPS on, I can commence a Modify>Align operation with source and destination points. You can see things moving around but as soon as this process is to set the 3rd destination, nothing more happens.  Now that is not unique to BricsCAD. It is also happening in CorelCAD and NanoCAD both of which use a similar CAD Engine to Dassault Draftsight.

The problem of working in the same plane is probably better known to the more experienced user and a pain to those new to cad if they don't grasp the basic concepts, so I would like to gain a better insight how to prevent such misalignments.

Are there any tutorials on this? In any case, my whole drawing career hinges on it so it is a big ask if you can show me the exact steps to keep stuff on the same drafting plane.

Can you help me with this please?

Comments

  • Mustafa Kocatürk
    Mustafa Kocatürk
    I would first go to the top view and zoom to extends (double click on the mouse wheesl). Than use the move command to move the flanches (in the red box) close to the main object.
    The have a distance of 2000m so it is not possible to see them in one view.  After moving all object together (check with zoom extend in top view) you will able to see all
    of them. Then use the object snaps.  Hope this helps...
    imageobjects.jpg
  • Richard Webb
    Richard Webb
    Although the solids look like they are close together in the as-saved drawing view, they are far apart in 3D space. Without changing the point of view (only use Pan), use Move and ESNAPs to get the two long flanges and the one small fillet object all connected to the base. At this point it doesn't matter whether they're in the right location on the base, just that they are all touching somewhere. See Step1.

    The other issue is that you have a stray polyline far away from the center, near (1823, 1823, 0). That makes a zoom to extents difficult. One way of getting to that line is to put your four main objects (base, two flanges, and the small fillet) onto a new layer and then freeze that layer. Now when you zoom to extents you'll find that line and can delete it. See Step2.

    From there, the rest should be straightforwards.
    imageStep2.jpg
    imageStep1.jpg
  • Aerospace Desk
    Aerospace Desk

    Thanks Richard and Mustafa,

    Thanks for the heads up. That is a very astute observation. After reading this and with some insight provided by others, I decided to design the plate again from scratch with a different approach. I am still not good at this stuff but I am better than when I started.

    I have attached a new file with the flanged plate completed. Just a few points to note:

    1. The plate is a t=0.040" thick with dimensions  roughly. 5.9"x3.9"x0.3" Alclad (tm) Sheet. I am using Inches as a Unit of Measurement.

    2. The major holes are 0.156" diameter (5/32" drill).

    3. The minor holes are 0.104" diameter (#37   drill).

    4. The minor holes are countersunk 100 deg on one end on the same face to a major diameter of 0.183" to accommodate a MS20426-A3-A3 Al rivet head.

    5. There are two major holes with a 0.005" spot-face on them on the same side the small hole countersinking. The spot-face has a diameter of 0.375" (5/32") which is put there after the plate is 1501 Alodine (tm) treated.

    6. The inside radii of the bends of the Alclad sheet are set to 3t, the outside 4t. Fillets are 3t. e.g. 3t= 3 x 0.040" = 0.120"

    I have also added a viewport in the Layout sheet and an A3 drawing sheet with several view ports. Probably all a bit small but on an A3 sheet should look OK for now. I am trying to get the First Angle Projection view perspective.

    However, with the Viewports and Layers, I am a bit lost (even after reading Help on the topics). Let me explain.

    (a) When I switch between views in the Model space, my approx. 6"x4"x1/2" flanged plate entity  does not maintain the same level of zoom. It keeps shrinking back a small size the size of a thumbnail. When you haven't got a wheeled mouse that is extremely annoying. What is causing this (apart form having the need to get a wheeled mouse)?

    (b) In the Layout 1 Sheet, my entity is always of the same size (thumbnail) in the viewport and always to one side. I did have it bigger at one stage and think I must have change something I didn't understand. Into the corner with me.

    (c) In the A3 sheet, the model doesn't appear in any of my viewports, although before I changed to multiple viewports the entity appeared just as it does in the layout.

    (c) I was messing around with the Layers as I wanted the Red Layer to be at the A3 drawing border level, the Blue Layer to be for the text on the drawing border blocks e.g. title, company name etc., and the Magenta Layer for entity drawing. 

    Can you help me with this please?

    Thanks in advance.

      

     

     

    Alclad Flanged Plate SHP17 BricsCAD.dwg

  • Louis_Verdonck
    Louis_Verdonck
     There is a small circle at the left of your 3D model, causing the model to shrink to thumbnail size when zooming to the extents of your drawing.
  • Aerospace Desk
    Aerospace Desk

    Thank you Louis. I am just learning to do some quality checks on my drawing and Select All tells no lies. I did find that circle and deleted it. It didn't change my thumbnail size entity. Now, to be fair to you, I have been told this can happen before but at that time I did not know how to check for it.

    So I did now also find an arc and a line. They are supposed to be red but I cannot find them other than the properties is giving there location. Would this then also cause this reduction in entity zoom?

    Thanks in advance if you could find a way of clearing those two bits out.

    Alclad Flanged Plate SHP18 BricsCAD.dwg

  • Louis_Verdonck
    Louis_Verdonck
    QuickSelect can select the line and the arc, without knowing their exact position.
    Click the QuickSelect icon at the top right corner of the Properties bar. The large button at the top reads: All (3).
    Click the large button and select Arc, then click the 'Add to new selection set' button.
    Repeat this procedure to select the line, but click the 'Add to current selection set' button in the final step.
    Now both the arc and the line are selected and you can delete them (or move them to a construction layer, which you can freeze, if you need the items later on).

  • Aerospace Desk
    Aerospace Desk

    Thanks Louis, that and another workaround involving cutting the flanged plate out of the model space seemed to work.

    I have attached another version of this file and it still has

    (a) thumbnail size image in the Layout 1 Viewport. I had wondered if this is actually the same entity in the model space or if it is a remnant - why isn't it magenta?

    (b) nothing in any viewport in the A3 sheet.

    Is it something to do with my layer controls?

    Alclad Flanged Plate BricsCAD SHP200.dwg

  • Louis_Verdonck
    Louis_Verdonck
    Please have a look at the drawing in attachment:
    In Layout2 i created 6 default views (top, left, right, back, front and bottom) along with 4 isometric views. These views were created using BASEVIEW. See the Help > Command Reference for more information about this command. I updated layout A3 as follows: to display the model in these viewports: double click inside the viewports (the thickened border indicates the viewport is selected), then double click with the mouse wheel (= zoom extents). I then adjusted the view orientation using ViewFrom. The 'Visual Style' property of the viewports is set to 'Hidden', except for the Isometric NE viewport, which has the 'Realistic' visual style.

    Alclad Flanged Plate BricsCAD SHP200.dwg

  • Aerospace Desk
    Aerospace Desk
    Ahh ha. Now that is clever Louis. Thank you for doing that. I am going to have to experiment with this. Long day for your support with my issues. Kudos to you for your caring approach.
  • Aerospace Desk
    Aerospace Desk

    Hi Louis,

    I found VIEWBASE was the command after a tad of confusion. Never mind.

    I tried this on a separate sheet just to get the hang of it. I have chosen the 1st Angle Projection. See attached.

    Just a few more questions:

    (1) How do I remove these collectively or any one of the generated black outlined views from the paper space (refer your Layout 2 and my Layout 1) ?

    (2) How do I remove, change the view inside a viewport? I just cannot see it in the Help file. If I highlight the part and click delete it deletes all of them even in the model space. So I want to put a different view there say.

    (3) Now, when I created this plate originally on paper,  I actually drew it on paper with the big spot face circles in a front view rotated 90 degrees to the left. So they would appear more to the bottom left in a front view and parallel to the model/paper space tabs bar.  How can I change the orientation and will it then reflect in the viewports of the A3-1 layout?

    Thanks in advance if you can help!

     

    Thank you!

    Alclad Flanged Plate BricsCAD SHP200B.dwg

  • Louis_Verdonck
    Louis_Verdonck
    (1) To remove generated drawings from a layout: please notice each drawing is a viewport using a standard view direction. In layout1 an layout2 the 'Drafting Viewports' layer is frozen. Thaw the layer, then select the viewport (click on its border) and delete it.
    (2) The display in the viewports is locked. Select the viewport then choose 'No' in the 'Display Locked' field in the Properties Bar.
    (3) The 'Orentation' option in the third prompt of the Viewbase command lets you choose which view of the geometry in model space will be used as the base view. You can run the Viewbase command as many times as you like, using a different base view orientation in each run. This will not affect any of the previously generated viewports.
    Generated viewports can be exported by the VIEWEXPORT command to model space or to a separate drawing as a block, which can then be exploded for further editing. However, the automatic update of the drawing when the 3D model changes is broken then.


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