Sketch Placement

[DarylWolf]

I may be not on my game here but for years I have wondered something so I thought I would throw it out there for some responses. When I go to sketch, you pick the plane you want to sketch in, first it always points to you when you almost always want it to point away from you, so you say flip, then the big one. You give it a reference plane and pick top bottom left or right. 90% of the time it spins my part around opposite of what I want. What is it looking for? A plane has neither a good side or bad side. Which side is it saying would be the top or bottom or whatever. I dont get it and never have. A plane is a plane. any help would be great. its driving me nuts. Thanks Daryl
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[DavidButz]

Pro/E Datum Planes do have "polarity". In the old days it was Yellow/Red:Positive/Negative. Now it's Brown/Black.

[DarylWolf]

That would make sense but mine just show up highlighted red. No variation between sides. Do you think there is an option to turn off and on. Any other ideas? Thanks Daryl

[DavidButz]

It shows up red after it's selected, and of course Mother Pro pre-selects one for you. But if you look closely you should be able to see a black or brown outline just inside the red one. If you want to pick your own reference, pick in the Reference field of the Dialog Box where the pre-selection is listed. If you just want to flip things, pick the opposite reference type in the Orientation field (Bottom vs. Top, Left vs. Right). The other thing to be aware of is that the pre-selection will depend to a great extent on how your model is oriented on the screen when you invoke Sketcher.

[JonathanHodgson]

This is one of the reasons we keep pre-Wildfire colours. With yellow and red planes, it was/is easy to teach your newbies that yellow is the "top" or "front", red is the "back" of a plane. My colleague even has a plastic model of the three intersecting planes in yellow and red! With the WF colours it appears that "front" is brown, and "back" is... erm... a slightly different shade of brown. Restful it may be; clear it isn't.

[DarylWolf]

Thanks guys. I agree that they could make it a bit more clear. I'm using WF5 and have been using since WF3 and I never noticed any color difference. I knew there should be a positive and negative side because someone told me about the colors. I just thought my configs were messed up and they werent' showing. Apparently you have to really be looking close to see. Thanks Again. Daryl

[WillyC]

This used to bug me quite a bit in older versions. Something I've noticed: If you can avoid the initial 'flip', the orientation almost always behaves as expected. I've come to pay less attention to this yellow arrow pointing 'at me' in Wildfire 4 than previously. Try a few experiments setting up sketch planes and you'll see what I mean. When you flip the direction of feature creation (if that's even what it's called now ... I don't read the prompts much anymore) while setting up sketcher it almost always reverses the outcome. If you leave it alone, your sketch will orient just like you want. The direction of feature creation can be reversed easily after the sketch. You still have to understand the color scheme of planes in ProE, of course. When you tell sketcher "FRONT" it will direct the brown side (I liked yellow and red better, too) of the selected plane to face you.