Manipulator default rotation direction

RoatanBill

How does the Manipulator determine the default rotation directions of the 3 available axis?

More importantly, Is there a way to signal the Manipulator to reverse that direction? There are times when I need to rotate something and the other end of the object tells me when to stop the rotation as when it intersects with another object in a certain way.

For example. given the 2 legs of a triangle made of square tubing, I don't know and don't want to calculate the hypotenuse length so I just make an extra long hypotenuse anchor it on one leg and rotate it in place with the manipulator. If the rotation direction is opposite of what I'd like, it's very difficult to do the rotation AND see the other end of the hypotenuse to gauge when to signal done.

BTW I tried to use ALIGN to do this but the 3D version doesn't offer the scale option that the 2D offers.

Roy Klein Gebbinck

The alignment of the Manipulator depends on the face you click, where you click on that face (in which corner), and the nearest edge.

Hans De Backer

The alignment of the Manipulator depends on the face you click, where you click on that face (in which corner), and the nearest edge.

Exactly, well said.

The attached gifs illustrate this behavior.
The white (bisector) lines between the edges depict the boundaries of the sensitive zones for each edge.

The alignment of the Manipulator behaves similar to the Dynamic UCS: to illustrate this I recorded a gif where the Manipulator uses similar colors as the UCS triad, X = red, Y = green, Z = blue.
The red X-axis is always aligned with the nearest edge while the blue Z axis is aligned with the face normal.
It is not important for users to care about the name of the local manipulator axis along which they move or rotate, so by default the manipulator axes use a uniform color.

The small silver spherical grips allow to re-orient the Manipulator, so far there is no key combination to do so.

Louis_Verdonck

See also:
https://help.bricsys.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006429914-Manipulator#the-location-and-orientation-of-the-manipulator

RoatanBill

Now I know why my testing gave me unreliable results. I didn't know about the split per corner.

BTW - https://help.bricsys.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006889733-Using-the-Manipulator-in-BricsCAD-Shape has a broken video link.

Thanks for the information.

Louis_Verdonck

@RoatanBill said:
BTW - https://help.bricsys.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006889733-Using-the-Manipulator-in-BricsCAD-Shape has a broken video link.

Thank you for reporting. The missing link has been fixed.