Dynamic UCS on Regions/Surfaces

Daniele Piazza

Is there a way to enable the Dynamic UCS for regions or surfaces? I could not find any configuration about it.
I'm writing a kind of WorkPlane extension using regions to be used as temporary geometry for sketches but the dynamic UCS ignores these kind of geometry.

Patrik Sparrman

? Works for me.

Daniele Piazza

Maybe it's just a configuratin problem. Here is my sample.

Steven_g

I get the same behaviour, but the help file does say that the dynamic UCS only works with solids

Daniele Piazza

OK. So I guess this is a feature request.

Roy Klein Gebbinck

@Daniele Piazza:
If you are using the Lisp API: You can create a solid from the entity list of a region. This solid would then only contain a single face.

Daniele Piazza

Brilliant! I just tested a C# snipped and it works properly. I'm still not sure if it's a good idea to use a "no-volume" solid. Anyway creating a proxy class would make easy to switch the solid with region or surface in the future.

Patrik Sparrman

See Gif few lines extrude, explode solid , draw line on surface , extrude region.

Daniele Piazza

Hi Patrik, I know (and enjoy!) the way BricsCAD works. Unfortunately I noticed people coming from history based CAD find it hard to work without the support of workplanes and axes. This is especially true when your 3D model has very few flat faces. Sometimes you need to create quirks, temporary solids to have a reference face to use for a new sketch.

This is the reason they asked me to write a kind of workplane (see gif)

Roy Klein Gebbinck

In BricsCAD you do not need a face for that. Just manipulating the UCS is enough as by default you draw in the XY plane of the current UCS. Displaying the grid can also be useful.

Daniele Piazza

Of course that is a very simple case. I agree with you, that we can use the UCS but my customers do not like much dealing with the UCS (for some that is a fairly complex concept!). I reckon this is the reason dynamic UCS was created. We can manually run the "_UCS" command and select the "_Face" option, but with the DUCS we can just forget it!
After hours of training, we noticed they like creating real "construction geometry" (planes/axes) in combination with the DUCS.

Patrik Sparrman

I can agree, as I have used systems with fixed graphical workingplanes it's very handy to have them on your side an just activate them,
If you need to flip them around its a bit of a pain today. Nice would be a named USC with a graphical representation that is easy to activate.
Not all things are square.