3 Replies Latest reply on Feb 12, 2018 10:31 AM by Jacob Corder

    Finding Coincident Faces

    Swme Eng
    Swme Eng Feb 6, 2018 11:30 AM

      Can some one explain the root point of planar surface to me? I have a macro that tries to find faces coincident to a pre-selected face while in an assembly, and while my testing for planar surfaces that are parallel works, I would like to further limit the faces to ones that are co-planar to within some tolerance. I apply the  transform to the root point of one of the planar faces, and it ends up catching faces that are not coincident within the tolerance. I was reading through the Transform2 help page and noticed that this creates the transform relative to the root component, does that mean that mean if the pre-selected face is not the root component then it neeeds to be transformed as well?

       

      Any insight on this process or potential workarounds would be greatly appreciated.

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        • Re: Finding Coincident Faces
          Jacob Corder
          Jacob Corder Feb 11, 2018 10:08 PM (in response to Swme Eng)

          Ok think of a vector with a start point.

           

          It's start point is x y z. It goes in a direction of a b c

           

          So start point is 0,0,0 (at origin)

           

          Direction is 1,0,0 which means it's only in the x direction. So pointing away from the origin in the +x axis.

          Direction is normalized which means it's length is 1 or -1. Not relevant here but good to know.

           

          Root point is 0,0,0 and direction is something. What you visibly see about a plane in solidworks is irrelevant also. A plane doesn't have outer bounds.

           

          So a plane is actually all points in space that is perpendicular to the axis at the root point.

            • Re: Finding Coincident Faces
              Swme Eng
              Swme Eng Feb 12, 2018 10:28 AM (in response to Jacob Corder)

              Jacob,

               

                   I was more wondering about items 3,4,5 of the variant array returned by Surface.PlaneParams. It seems to me that it grabs an arbitrary point on the plane, and I was trying to understand how it determines that point.

                • Re: Finding Coincident Faces
                  Jacob Corder
                  Jacob Corder Feb 12, 2018 10:31 AM (in response to Swme Eng)

                  its determined by how it was created i would assume.

                   

                  front right top views would have 0,0,0 probably

                   

                  anything referencing geometry would inherit the point parameters from that.  and i would bet that they are probably the closest point to origin but i am probably wrong.

                   

                  so if you wanted to know. create a bunch of planes and debug.print the root point to find out.