Align with origin?

Need help? We are here.
1

When inporting bodies they may not align with the grid system. Is there a way to align a point on the body to the origin specifically? Such a simple thing but ether I can’t find how to do it or it’s just not an option?

Thanks in advance!

(iOS)

2

Hi Wayno,
If you sketch a small circle at the origin, you can then use the Align Tool to get many imported bodies where you want them. Select all the imported bodies, click the align tool, then click the face on those bodies you want at the origin, then click the circle.

However, if you are importing STL, there is no face on it that you can select. For this case, you can try converting to STEP file here:

3

Thank you.

have been creating a small body at the origin point in order to help align with the origin. It seems like a ‘work around’ and was used to being able to select the origin in Solidworks so wanted to bring it up in case I was missing something.

I will continue with the work around but I hope it’s a feature that can be added in the future.

1 Like
4

When using this method, you can easily define which face to align to the origin. Often, I will make a cylinder so I can align parts to an axis.

Another method if you want to keep the same orientation of the body you wish to put at the origin is to transform it with translate. Here you pick one point on the source and in this case and the origin as the destination.

I have not used SolidWorks, but I have not found either of these method to be inconvenient.

5

Just to second this… I’m constantly working with .stl files right out of 3d print sources to make small tweaks, having to intermediately convert to step format isn’t convenient and kludges up the workflows. I really would like an easier solution to center mesh bodies to the origin point. Even something as simple as manually setting the coordinates for the imported mesh body to (0,0,0) would be perfect. The fact that more people aren’t struggling with this implies to me that some of my workflows are odd but it is really annoying that “center this thing in the design workspace” isn’t a feature.