Hi Im designing a dome made from rolled steel tubes. I need to take each individual steel tube profile to a 2D work drawing to send to the Roller.
The position of the tubes are not perpendicular to anything, so section-plane is not really helpful.
So far I have 3D rotated each tube to lay flat on Cplane, but that is tedious. Is there not a simple way to extract the 2D image?
Cutplane 3points is brilliant way to make a section through the steel profile, but how to get an 2D image from this angled cutting plane?
I would create (and save) a CPlane for each tube you want a drawing of. You can set it via 3point similar to cutPlane. Then as you set up your detail for drawing, make the appropriate CPlane active, and you can use plan to orient to view to the CPlane.
Below is a quickie Python script that might help automate this… You need to click on the tube seam line to select, if that’s a planar curve, the tube to which the seam belongs will be sectioned at that plane and the resulting section curves will be placed on the world XY plane.
Edit: Actually this is not going to work unless the seam line is oriented correctly, which is not guaranteed… Back to the drawing board… Shows you what happens if you try to get fancy…
I do have a simpler one that is guaranteed to work if you have the original curve the tube is made from… posted below…
Back to the drawing board… Shows you what happens if you try to get fancy…