this one has bothered me forever. what am i missing that dimensioning in perspective should not work for all axis? not even DimAligned lets you dimension vertically in perspective, instead we have to switch to an orthogonal left right front view.
i always thought that was a bug on mac, but after checking the forum here once more i found that this seems to behave the same on pc… but why? can we please make working in perspective possible without having to switch constantly?
before somebody comes and explains because dimensioning only works planar to the xy axis, please dont bother answering, my wish is simply to work sufficiently without being complicated.
The thing is, a dimension still has to lie in a plane, so “vertical” dimension (i.e. parallel to the CPlane Z axis) still has an infinite number of plane possibilities rotating around that axis. So how do you choose which one is correct? Maybe it needs a new command that takes a 4th point - point, point, point in the plane of rotation (which would fix the preview in that plane), and finally pull the distance from axis for the dimension line and click to set.
i think most of the dimensions i am doing are just purely vertical, and this is in such cases probably also the only way one would dimension. so an affinity towards xy would totally be alright in this case.
then simply like followed:
the orientation of the mouse on the xy plane
dependent and orthogonal from the last point drawn
it exactly has 2 out of infinite possibilities where to lay in z can be aligned with x or y again i am saying just look how other sw packages has things figured out and see things can be pretty simple. lot of time i am listening here on forum how this and that is super complicated and in reality it is trivial (blocks like in sketchup, display modes in file, dimensions in z etc)
I didn’t say it’s complicated, simply that there choices to make and I’m sure that if it’s arbitrarily restricted to aligning X or Y then there will be people complaining why they can’t put them on a different angle.
i believe people here are rational. this particular thing is really not optimal with dims right now you can only work in 2d with 1 cplane. optimal state is to work in 3d with 1 cplane. that requires 4 type of dimensions: x, y, aligned, vetical (aligned to x,y interactively).
As I said, in V8 you can use AutoCPlane to help. Subobject select the object face or a planar curve to which you want to align a vertical dimension and then make your dimension while that plane is active.
it does, i got to trying that out now, but i dont use autocplane i actually have turned it off the moment it started distracting me and never missed it… i can see it has some nice tones to it and might use it again.
still dimensioning then would be bound to the cplane, like but often does that not correlated with how one would want to lay out the dimension in a draft for communicating with client/production, i would wish something more freely like explained above.
i am not sure if there is a wish list for V9 so maybe that would be an interesting add in
again i am saying just look how other sw packages has things figured out and see things can be pretty simple. lot of time i am listening here on forum how this and that is super complicated and in reality it is trivial (blocks like in sketchup, display modes in file, dimensions in z etc)
right now you can only work in 2d with 1 cplane. optimal state is to work in 3d with 1 cplane. that requires 4 type of dimensions: x, y, aligned, vetical (aligned to x,y interactively).