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Sketch Orientation; "Look-At" Feature

Sketch Orientation; "Look-At" Feature

Autodesk, please fix your broken "Look at Sketch" feature, which currently rotates the camera in asinine fashion such that your little labeled viewcube is upside down, where "up" is actually "down".

 

When I create a sketch on the "right" plane, the "look at" feature should cause 'up' to be 'up' (RIGHT should be right-side-up on the viewcube).  When I create a sketch on the top plane, down should be forward (TOP should be right-side-up on the viewcube).

 

This problem has been in existence for at least four years with no fix.  This seems like an exceedingly simple problem. Please fix the problem.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Inventor/Why-does-the-camera-turn-180-degrees-after-selecting...

 

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Inventor/Why-does-the-camera-turn-180-degrees-after-selecting... 

25 Comments
BryanKelley
Alumni
Status changed to: Under Review
This project [US14272] is under review by the development team.
timdown73
Collaborator

Funny, I never bothered to post about this because I thought it was something I was doing wrong.  I hope they fix this, it's very aggravating.  Thanks for posting it.  (Again.):smileyhappy:

NathanGMartin
Enthusiast

Augh, this continues to cause frustration.  Moments ago I created a sketch on a surface, looking at my model in more or less the "RIGHT" view.  Inventor drew the sketch and then sucessfully "looked at" the sketch with the correct orientation; RIGHT is rightside up, in the up-is-up orientation. Yay.

 

Well, then I realized I actually wanted to offset that sketch from the surface I originally drew it on.  Inventor won't let me drag an offset plane from the "redefine" dialog (why not?) So I created a work plane by clicking my surface and dragging to offset it from the surface... then I redefined my sketch on it... which Inventor promptly proceeded to rotate by 90º!

 

Augh!

 

One thing this does seem to cement to me is that it is indeed the "look at" feature that is borked and not talking to the viewcube (or the user).  The sketch drawer can't really help itself; I understand that Inventor wants to keep Z and Y and X in the same direction, and that when I'm on the left face of a part at least one of those vectors end up reversed from the right face.  But Autodesk, surely you see that the user does not want or need to have the view orientation itself flipped with the CS each time we change sides, especially if we have gone through the trouble to remap the view cube already!  I don't think the user cares much about X and Y and Z for thier own sake; I care about meaningfully interfacing with my model and naming my views what i want in a consistent manner.  XYZ is a last-resort when I need an objective frame of reference.  

 

I'm not asking for inventor to actually draw the sketch in an impossible "up-is-up" CS orientation every time, whether or not I'm on the left or the right or the top; but I am asking that the view the user is presented with be put through a transform that corrects it such that the up-is-up orientation is what I get to work with.  If I create a sketch on a surface, I want a view that has the smallest possible combined angle between a named-view-zero (in "up-is-up" orientation) and a view normal to the sketch plane.

 

In summary:  The viewcube is great. The viewcube in intuitive. Please abandon XYZ as a view-governor to the greatest extent possible; the viewcube does that better.  In most cases the user does not need to see XYZ when the viewcube is working properly.  Currently "Look at" is encouraging a needless fistfight between the UCS and the Viewcube.  Let the viewcube win.

 

Just for fun, I'm taking a break:

I speak english; Inventor and the UCS speaks technobabble. But! we have an interpreter: the viewcube.  The viewcube sure seems like it is designed to translate technobabble into english, and it does a great job at doing so.  I talk with the viewcube and we communicate very nicely together.  Then I tell inventor I want to draw on it's right face, and what happens?  Inventor nods it's head, covers the viewcube's ears and mouth, then speaks to me in Technobabble.  

 

NathanGMartin
Enthusiast

Update:

Changed my mind.  "Look at" works great.  What is needed is not a "User-View Orientation transform" but rather a "Sketch CS Transform".  The view transform is insuffiecient becuase of what happens to sketch text.  Reorienting the view, while better than the status quo, would still leave inventor drawing 90º or 180º rotated text on sketches... which happened to me this morning, and is what changed my mind.  

NathanGMartin
Enthusiast

Update: the text issue is a pain, but text is only rarely used in sketches. The major cause of pain for most users has got to be the trail-and-error nature of using Horizontal vs Vertical constraints. 

 

Also, given that fixing this is going to require a complex and somewhat intelligent CS transform (or at least a CS check) for every single new sketch, this is not really a 'simple problem' and I regret the snarkiness and dismissiveness of my original post.

 

Nonetheless, the annoyance and time waste factors are large.

LT.Rusty
Advisor

I wonder if this is related to the horizontal and vertical constraints meaning one thing when you're working on sketches on XY / XZ and something entirely different when you're working on YZ?

FireBallFab
Advocate

change it!!

dan_szymanski
Autodesk
Status changed to: Accepted

Accepted idea [721]. Thanks!

NathanGMartin
Enthusiast

Sweet!  Once again, it's a more complicated issue than I thought, and I apologize for the aggressive and angry nature of the first post.  It has generated lots of frustration, though.

spence.greene
Contributor

Please fix this.

dcarr
Observer

Wondering if there is a fix yet. though it only takes a few mouse clicks to fix it does cause a reduction in production and a slow decline in morale leading to frustration and agitation cause by constantly having to perform remidial task. everytime.... please fix before autodesk inventor 2014. Thanks guys.

Patrickwesc
Contributor

Do you listen to your customers?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

NathanGMartin
Enthusiast

Well, Patrickwesc, the idea is marked accepted, and it has an ID number.   We can only hope. 🙂

r.lehmann79
Advocate

When creating a sketch on a surfce of a part, the sketch orientation often is "wrong". The view turns and the part is shown upside down.

Also the origin of the sketch is not congruent with the part origin.

You can manipulate this manually as shown in the screencast.

 

But it would be very helpful to have a general option that sets the sketch coordinate system congruent to the global part coordinate system.

This will also bring more stability to the part features: when deleting fillets often the sketches loose their origin and/or orientation.

 

Tags (1)
karthur1
Mentor

My thoughts exactly.  I have posted a similar thread here in reference to the same issue. This has been mentioned here several times before.

r.lehmann79
Advocate

Hello guys!

 

Do you like this idea?

 

Please refer to http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-ideastation/sketch-improvement-to-make-things-more-stable/idc... and give your Kudos for this idea!

 

Regards

 

Ralf

janrienk
Contributor

At first I thought I was doing something wrong because I didn't think any programmer would allow the software would behave so un-intuitively. Even when I select the top of the view cube first so that no rotation at all would be needed for me to start making my sketch the view still flips 180 degrees when when I start 2D sketch

 

1. How the hell is this still a thing in Inventor 2016?

2. Has anyone found a workaround yet?

 

DRoam
Mentor

@NathanGMartin, you made some very spot-on comments (three years ago) regarding this topic. Especially these:

 

[NGM]: "Changed my mind.  "Look at" works great.  What is needed is not a "User-View Orientation transform" but rather a "Sketch CS Transform".  The view transform is insuffiecient becuase of what happens to sketch text.  Reorienting the view, while better than the status quo, would still leave inventor drawing 90º or 180º rotated text on sketches... which happened to me this morning, and is what changed my mind."

 

[NGM]: "Update: the text issue is a pain, but text is only rarely used in sketches. The major cause of pain for most users has got to be the trail-and-error nature of using Horizontal vs Vertical constraints."

 

I believe you're spot-on there in identifying the issue. In fact, the "Look at" tool is actually in a very good standing, because we can choose in the Application Options whether it will "Perform Minimum Rotation" or Align with Local Coordinate System". The problem is, as you've identified, the "Local Coordinate System" is often in a nonsensical orientation, which results in issues with text, horizontal/vertical constraints, and view orientation.

 

I believe the solution to this problem is that two things need to be changed:

 

  1. We need to have the option for Inventor to, when automatically defining the LCS for sketches, define them in an orientation that makes sense with the View Cube. When possible, the Y-axis should point "Up". When the sketch plane is perfectly horizontal, the X-axis should point to the right. These two simple rules would always ensure a sensible orientation of the coordinate system relative to the View Cube.
  2. Sometimes, however, we need to have more control over the orientation of the LCS. As such, Inventor should give us the ability to define the orientation of the LCS as part of the same operation when creating or re-defining a sketch, rather than the current workflow where we can only define the sketch plane but have to fix the LCS after-the-fact.

The ability to define the LCS for a new sketch during the defining process would be a nice convenience. However, it's a much more critical need when we're re-defining the sketch plane for an existing sketch. 99% of the time, when this is done, we want the new sketch to be oriented the same way as the old one. But often Inventor orients it differently. And this throws off all of the "Horizontal/Vertical" constraints, and the result is a disaster--the sketch is completely jumbled almost beyond repair. Allowing us to define the LCS as part of the sketch re-define operation would eliminate this issue.

 

I posted a similar idea some time ago which everyone who wants this fixed can vote for to help get this issue recognized. It's essentially the same as you re-defined your own suggestion to be, NathanGMartin--that the sketch coordinate system orientation needs to be consistent with the view cube. You can vote for it here: Option for new sketches to align properly with View Cube

 

I think the other half of the issue, being able to re-define the sketch LCS manually during the define/re-define process, is just as critically important, and I hope that Autodesk recognizes it as such and implements it in tandem with the sketch LCS orientation fix.

DRoam
Mentor

@dan_szymanski, could you clarify what's included in the scope of what was Accepted in this Idea? The premise of the Idea evolved a lot (through @NathanGMartin's comments) from its initial posting/description, but no comment was made as to what specifically was being addressed when the Idea was Accepted.

 

I ask because there are several other Ideas out there regarding Sketch Coordinate Systems, and depending on what was Accepted with regards to this Idea, they may be resolved as well. Specifically I'm referring to these: Sketch Improvement to make things more stable (66 votes), Option for new sketches to align properly with View Cube (49 votes), Sketch Coordinate System (25 votes), and (more loosely related) Redefine sketch should be keep associativity of projetced curves (32 votes).

 

Basically, there's a need for more control over the automatic and manual definition of the coordinate system for new/redefined Sketches. And I'm wondering how much of that will be addressed as a part of this Idea being Accepted?

DRoam
Mentor

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