Update to Project (P) function in sketch environment

[Anonymous]

I spend 40+ hours each week working in Solidworks and Creo for my day job, and another 10-15 in Fusion.  I think the place where Fusion lacks the most compared to its pricey alternatives is the sketch environment; specifically how it references features outside of the sketch.

My recommendation is to allow references outside of the sketch without using the project tool. Project has it's uses, but it should not be necessary for things like creating a coincident constraint between the endpoint of a line and an edge on the body. Projecting every edge/point/face you want to reference into the sketch makes it very cluttered. See screen shot below from an air intake where I'm adding screw bosses. 

That said, one build on the Project tool that would be very useful, is if you could select planar faces perpendicular to the sketch plane and have them come in as construction, reference datums (i.e. an infinite length dashed line). When these references break, please make it possible to reattach/replace the missing face, rather than delete the projection and recreate all of the sketch constraints built on it.

Finally, I've noticed that sketching on the face of a body and sketching on a datum plane are very different in that when you sketch directly on a body, there's a "hidden" reference to the geometry of the face. This makes extrudes a pain because it will automatically look for closed profiles in my sketch by including the geometry of the face. If I wanted those edges included in my sketch, that is when I would use Project (P). I recommend making sketching directly on the face of body the same as sketching on a datum plane. (Side note, this has negative implications when selecting profiles in the CAM environment). 

[TrippyLighting]

The autoproject feature can be turned off in the preferences. There are two such settings that effect what is projected when. This will allow you to have full control over what is projected into your sketches.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the tip, @TrippyLighting. That certainly helps with the last point.

I still think it's cumbersome to have every reference project into the sketch, and while I know I can turn projections into construction geometry manually, it's annoying that they tend to divide my closed profiles. This affects the robustness of my sweeps/rotates/extrudes. 

Generally speaking, it's good practice to have one closed profile per sketch, and then call out the whole sketch in your features (i.e. extrude) rather than picking and choosing certain closed profiles within that sketch. In my experience it results in fewer issues when the model rebuilds. 

One could argue that it's faster to be able to create multiple closed profiles within the sketch, and that's fine, but referenced edges shouldn't interfere with that by default.