Hotkey for "Normal To" Function

[mreid]

Hey guys,

SolidWorks has a feature "Normal To" which rotates and zooms a model to a normal view orientation of any selected plane or surface. This is similar to the "Sketch View" function in Creo, but can be accessed outside of sketchmode. Has anybody come up with a macro to duplicate this function?

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[pnos · Accepted solution]

Creo 3 contains this feature normal view

[mreid]

Thanks! Unfortuantely I'll be in Creo 2 for at least another year, any ideas there?

[ptc-4864603]

abandon ship before you lose sight of land

[dgschaefer]

In Creo you can use the orient dialog, but you can't simply pick a plane as the "normal to". Creo requires you to define the rotational orientation as well by picking a perpendicular surface.

Pick the planar surface you want to look at as the front, then a perpendicular surface to face right, top, bottom or left.

In SW, it assumes the rotational orientation of the view for you when you use the "Normal to" command. Handy in that it's easy to look square at a surface, not so handy when it spins it around to some oddball angle, which I've seen it do.

[mreid]

Thanks Doug,

You're right that Creo meets us half-way with "Reorient," but for cases where a perpendiduclar feature does not already exist, the designer must first create a plane perpendicular to the surface (or some similar action). SolidWorks is beating Creo one click to a dozen on this one; I just want a quick-mn-dirty method....

[pshepherdson]

If I recall, Inventor had this too. one click on a face, the models spins to thaty face, you're looking at that face. They also had a neat rotate feature, whereas you click the rotate tool & are able to spin the model as you want. But, if you hit the shift key, you got a cube superimposed on your model, oriented to the front-top-side orientation. You then just clicked a face of the cube, and your model spun around to show that face / orientation. AND, If I recall, if you held teh shift key, and RMB + swiped your mouse, the model would spin, and keep spinning! Nice! A slow swipe and the model would revolve at a slow pace, good for an all around look.

And, in drawing mode, in Inventor, you placed your 'base view'. You then added projection views just by clicking the view location; click left of the model, and you got a left view, right, a right view, and so on.. You selected teh views you wanted, then withe OK, all the views you chose wodul be made. And, if you clicked the upper right corner, you'd get an ISO view of the base view! Same with each corner. No need to set up the ISO views in a view manager.. The iso views could be set as 'independent' from the base view, so you could delete the base view, and keep the ISO you want, shift it around the sheet...

Creo may have the power, but other CAD systems seem to have the feel!