Hello,

I was wondering if anybody works with round tubular structural members that need to be detailed.

Following situation:

3D SKELETON SKETCH WITH ARBITRARY ANGLES (NOT PARALLEL TO DEFAULT PLANES).

NOW INSERT ROUND TUBING (NO PLANAR FACES) SEE ATTACHED SAMPLE.

My question: how do you get projected plan views of these members so you can make detailed drawings.

My issue with current limitations:

- weldment members need body faces in order to orientate them before creating a drawing view (round tubing doesn't have any)

- The align drawing view edge (vertical or horizontal) is plain and simple a bad joke (never works and if it does it rotates the wrong way & doesnt update after design change)

- I can add named views in the model however how do you get the model to align in two planes. I tried creating two perpendicular planes using the skeleton sketch,

however if you preselect the two planes SW can't rotate the view so plane number one is the front face and plane number two is the top face like it does when selecting planar

model faces (so this also is a limping work around and difficult to do)

- last but not least when the 3d sketch changes and the plane moves, all your weldment body drawings are now out of angle and all named views need to be reset,  not
to mention the manual rotate view angle in order to get those bodies to align with horizontal or vertical paper space.

So here it is. Who has experience and knows of a productive way to make drawings for round weldment members that are angled in space and drawings that easily update
on design change?

Hope somebody knows..

If SW listens, aligning a drawing view model edge to horizontal or vertical should be easy. Either give me an option to flip the view if it aligns the wrong way, or tell me the
angle in the rotate view dialog of the selected straight edge (like photoshop), or give me an option to align weldment members vertical or horizontal since by definition,

structural members have a long axis (extrusion axis) and comparably small sections and since all weldments tie into a sketch, why not make this available.

could be so simple...

thanks,

Elmar