Hello,

I'm having an advanced problem that I'm unable to solve with my current knowledge. I have a body in a model, and my goal is to find the maximum cross-sectional area of that body along the Z axis via VB.NET macro. There might be some other bodies around, so the macro must evaluate that particular body only.

A screenshot for illustration purposes:

I placed the Plane 1 at the location where I know the maximum cross-sectional area is, but the plane is just for illustration purposes. For a different model or a different shape, that maximum cross-section might be somewhere else along the Z axis. I need my macro to find that spot on it's own, and tell me the location and area values of that cross-section with a reasonable precision.

I'm actually doing this with virtual bodies to speed things up. The closest solution I could think of was measuring the boundaries of the model, slicing it into, say 100 slices, and measuring area of each slice to find the one with the largest area. But this is a very crude method, I'm sure there's a more elegant one. I also thought of producing an outline (shadow) of the body on a plane, and measuring it's area, but with certain body shapes, this might produce inaccurate results. Bottom line, I want avoid using features and sketches at all costs.

I would be grateful if you could suggest some ideas.

Thanks in advance!