Tuesday 23 February 2016

Redefining middle plane of Content Centre parts.


While writing this post I realised that it's practically 1 year to the day since my last post! Seems like only last month. Time sure flies.

Anyway, onto the topic of this post. The title is really referring to Structural Steel members placed from the Content Centre (CC). Each family, even those supplied by Autodesk, appears to be an extrusion from the Start Plane out 1 direction, therefore making a midpoint Flush/Flush constraint difficult because you need to do some calculations (1/2 the member length) to get it constrained mid-plane into your assembly. For reasons I won't go deeply into now, I place all CC members as Custom. I do this is mainly because the file becomes somewhat editable and I can change the extrusion to get the mid-plane where I want it, in the middle.