I have a sketch which is in a plane that is at an odd angle incline (horizontal in one direction, but at an angle in the other direction).
I want to rotate the sketch plane so it is horizontal.
I can use the measure tool to see the angle (with a bunch of decimals), and I could rotate by the negative of that number, but that does not seem to be a good way of doing it.
Thanks.
Hi Peter
Select the sketch in the items list on the left.
Then press ‘M’ on the keyboard if that is still your short cut for MOVE.
Then drag or rotate the whole sketch with the Move & Rotate symbols, just like moving any object.
see picture.
Have fun, Arron
one way to do it:
draw a square on the arbitrary plane
make a solid of this and the sketch in question
make another cube on preferred base plane
select all on the arbitrary plane and then Align
choose an edge on both solid cubes
now Project the sketch on base plane
…not perfect but as you loose splines etc but the sketch is there with more than four decimals
But when I rotate like that, it rotates in 5° increments, and it does not snap to horizontal.
Is there some way to force it to snap to horizontal (even though the starting angle is something like 16.12345°)
If I project from the inclined plane to the horizontal plane, wont that result in a squashed result? Ie, a square would become a rectangle?
What BKE is describing this.
Use Align Tool
Use Project Tool to recreate the sketch.
If we could copy and paste angles within the app we wouldn’t need to do this.
We don’t have rotation snap based on main XYZ origin, but the starting rotation point of the model or sketch, that would be a new feature we need.
I usually write down the degree as note somewhere and just type it in manually, yes not very productive.
OK, so align the body first. Yes, that works fine.
Hopefully some way to align a sketch plane will happen at some point. Or snapping to horizontal/vertical perhaps.
Thanks
Thanks.
Actually I’m wrong there is a way!
I just remembered how I used to do it Solidworks. History Tree is so long I always avoided using it.
Select your Sketch and check your Sketch History. You can change planes.
This will affect your history downstream, extruded parts, etc… they will also change orientation.
That works well.
This didn’t matter to me since my objective was to get DXFs that I could laser cut from my various parts, and the best method I’ve found so far (including stuff I’ve learnt from this thread) is:
It’s more than a little tedious, but it works.
It’d be much nicer if there was an Export DXF from Face which basically did that sequence internally. For making laser cut objects, this would be a fantastic addition!
Thats a feature other have requested as well.
You could use the Drawing feature in shaper to export flat sides.
You could also use a unfold app like this one https://www.unfolder.app/
Its for papercraft but for getting flat dxf dimensions/math is the same and app is cheap.
I think that is what I tried and I found it extremely fiddly to get just the relevant face exported as a DXF.
Export Face as DXF would definitely massively improve the workflow, but I pretty much have the sequence down now so it is just tedious.
I did figure there must be tools that could take the 3D exported part and turn it in to a 2D DXF. But hopefully Shapr3D will add the feature since it has lots of other export options, and exporting for laser cutting seems a growing market.
