Window the right half of a multi layer 3D drawing and stretch it
I have a multi layer 3D drawing and now want to alter it by stretching everything inside a window a certain amount. I want to stretch the right half by windowing and specifying a displacement.
To put this in terms everyone can understand, suppose I have a multi layer 3D drawing of a complete car and all its components; thousands of components on hundreds of layers.
Engineer says - 'we need to replace the transmission to engine gasket with one that's 1/16" thicker, so move the engine, front wheel, headlights, radiator, etc forward by 1/16", stretching the chassis, body work, etc by that amount.
Is this somehow possible? My old CAD app had this capability by moving the grips within a window a given displacement.
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How would that work? Are round rods deformed into ellipses? Screw threads change pitch? Does the carefully sized environmental connector housing now have a leak because it's larger?
It's possible now to move some things intelligently. For example, you can use push/pull or move on a face of a cube with rounded edges and the edge geometry retains its proportions while a 100x100x100 cube is pulled to a 200x100x100 block.
But for thousands of components on hundreds of layers? Maybe if everything was properly constrained so that it would move the axle and not distort it, but could it be smart enough to also move the axle mounts and adjust the mating faces where the mounts attach to the chassis?
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Richard Webb: As I mentioned, my old app would move the grips within the window and leave any grips outside the window alone. And, yes, you could end up with some odd results if you didn't take precautions.
For any entity that straddles the dividing line, that might require additional research per item. The engine, radiator, for example move forward as is. The front of the chassis moves forward effectively stretching it 1/16".
My old CAD app had a 'move - point' where point is defines equivalent to BricsCAD grips. It was incredibly handy for stretching or shrinking things orthogonally or even converting a rectangular solid into a parallelogram solid. The app provided the raw power and it was up to the user to figure out if it was reasonable to use that power in any given circumstance.
For my project at hand on BricsCAD, I'm having to move things on individual layers, using various commands (move, dmmove, pushpull, etc) to accomplish what I could do with just a single move - point in the old app.
I guess from your response that such a facility doesn't exist in BricsCAD.
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I had this in Microstation too and used it quite often.
It has a permanent Marquee called a Fence.
In Stretch Mode you can move all contents or parts
of it. So all Solids Vertices inside of the Fence will
move and stretch the Solids Dimensions.Same as you would do in a Mesh Modeler.
In Bricscad, e.g. for Architectural Objects, you could
workaround by Selecting all Faces with a Marquee and
BIMDRAG or PUSHPULL at once.
That should also move and or stretch Solids.0 -
I just looked up 'Marquee' in BricsCAD and got no hits so I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Your use of 'vertices' is much better that my use of 'grips' as it's more accurate. Vertices is what I meant but couldn't think of the proper term.
I've used selectalignedfaces to pushpull faces on a plane, but how would you also move a whole solid along with the faces? e.g. pushpull the face of the gasket by 1/16" in my example, but how would you include the entire engine, headlights, and other whole entities in that one command?
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You can stretch 3D solids with the _DmMove command. The command can be used to move edges or faces of one or more solids. To window select faces tap the Ctrl key once (for edges tap Ctrl twice) before clicking the second window point.
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I meant a marquee selection, like Roy mentioned.
If you have a Solid which is completely included
in your face selection, all of its faces will be selected.
So when all faces being moved afterwards, it will just mean
that the whole solid gets moved.
If your selection will only select one or a few faces of a solid,
It means moving those faces will stretch that solid away from
the excluded faces.If you see it from the BIM side, BIM tools are even smarter.
Like BIMDRAG a single wall will stretch or shrink all connected
walls and slabs automatically.0 -
Michael, Roy:
I finally got it to work as you described. For the longest time, the CTRL key was doing absolutely nothing.
I then remembered I had a mouse pointer locator installed under Ubuntu Linux that was activated by the CTRL key. Every time I pressed the CTRL key, that locator would eat the keystroke and BricsCAD never heard it.
I've been watching that locator pop up for so long my mind didn't register it as anything odd. I disabled it and now things work.
Thank you for your help and patience.
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