How to tell what sketch plane a drawing is using?

[kjav]

Hello. I've been at Fusion for about a year of regular use. I've got my head around general workflow, but something I find to be nails on a chalkboard is the management of the history tree with medium to complex assemblies. In Solidworks I never had these frustrations.

Is there any way to tell what plane a drawing is presently using? All I can find is how to re-define a plane. I don't want to change it, I just want to know what it is. The obvious places to look are no help:

1) "Redefine" plane just gives an option to select a new plane, without telling you what plane it is presently on (I'm pretty sure this is where SW showed the plane)

2) Edit Sketch doesn't show the present plane. Seems like an obvious bit of information to show in the window.

Any help much appreciated. Thanks!

[davebYYPCU]

Soooo design dependant, and I am sole author here, but you are right nothing obvious is available,

but my technique is to hide all but the relevant / question sketch, run the mouse over the Construction planes until they highlight the one for the sketch.

Might help....

[jeff_strater]

I always just edit the sketch, and turn on the sketch grid.  I find it's pretty easy to see the sketch plane with the grid on, and rotating the view.

[g-andresen]

Hi,

maybe MST Sketchtools  is a useful tool for you?

günther

[laughingcreek]

@jeff_strater - I've had this discussion before with AD, with about the same response.  The attached example is very contrived, bit does illustrate the issue a bit.   It would take a little more detective work to figure out which planes sketch 2,3,and 4 are on.  one is on an origin plane, one is on the face of the solid, and one is on the origin plane of component 1.

[TrippyLighting]

@laughingcreek If you use the MTS sketch tools @g-andresen has pointed out I believe they have a function that will show the sketch plane.

However, unfortunately they are Windows only.

[laughingcreek]

Yes.  That tool works fine.  But it only works when you are actively editing the sketch in question.   And of course there are other tests you can do to figure out what plane a sketch is on eventually.  But it seems like this is a piece of info that should be more easily discover-able.   selecting a sketch line indicates what sketch and component it's in on the browser tree.  why not the plane or body also?

In my example, if you accidentally selected the body for the plane when you meant to select the origin plane, you could be very far along in a model before it blows up.  And figuring out what the mistake was can be a bit tedious.  I say this b/c that is the exact mistake I helped someone tease out a while back.  The response from AD at the time was the same.  It's easy if you edit it the sketch and look at the grid.  That obviously doesn't work for the very simple example I posted.  And when debugging someones model, editing every sketch and examining the grid isn't the first thing I generally think to do.

[TrippyLighting]

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@laughingcreek wrote:

...  But it seems like this is a piece of info that should be more easily discover-able. ...

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I totally agree!

[jeff_strater]

@laughingcreek - I'm not denying that this would be useful to have.  In the larger scheme of things, though, I believe that this is probably not one of the most important missing bits of functionality.  IMO, there are lots of more important things that we could spend time on.  Just my opinion, though.

[TrippyLighting]

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@jeff_strater wrote:

@..  IMO, there are lots of more important things that we could spend time on.  Just my opinion, though.

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Agreed!

[kjav]

Thank you all for the suggestions. 

Just turning on the plane is easy enough, but in an assembly with 10-50 other parts, there are often many planes that are coincident. It is possible to begin a drawing in one part based on a plane or face of another part, etc, which I often do to save time.

Overall the entire history tree system is awful IMO. Having an actual history tree in SW where I can logically stack things up and spin them open was easy. I like the rest of Fusion, but I constantly flip flop in my mind if it's worth it because the history management is so bad in Fusion.

Dragging back through a massive list of small icons at the bottom that all run together with no way to really organize them is very hard. Doing the color swipes over the top is no help to me as they still all appear totally random. The only option I see is packing them into groups, which requires you to do all edits to a given part sequentially, which isn't realistic when making assemblies w many parts based on each other.

This results in a long line of the identical icon that you can only figure what is what by hovering over it, and once you identify what group you want to mess with, it won't stay highlighted if you click something else, so you better not look away from it because your eye will forget which you had. I literally often put my finger on my monitor to hold my spot in the history markers and hope Fusion doesn't scroll it left/right on me or reset the marker to the start of the part. (Which it does many times in a given editing session and it's infuriating. I never do anything that should tell Fusion I want to scroll the history back to the start, yet that's where it goes very often, so you have to drag the little sliver of a scroll bar all the way to the right through 3 or 5 screens of little icons at the bottom, then when it hits the end at the right finally, you have to release it, then try it again because it often leaves a few icons of your most recent couple edits not showing, which is often the very edit I want to look at. It eventually shows up after bumping the slider sliver against the right side a couple times).

Then there's the micro scroll bar that almost blends in that you have to search for along the bottom of a very wide monitor, and the fact that when you right click and select "Find in Browser", about 93% of the time, nothing is actually selected in the browser along the left side - just the original part is often selected, and even at that, it's not "selected", it's just shown with a faint wavy underline which is also hard to pick out when you have 50 items down the left of your screen. If this "Find in browser" caused the tree on the left to spin down and paint a big red highlight bar over the sketch selected in the history on the bottom, that would be a awesome and the way I would expect the tool to work. It's almost useless as it is.

Even if you guys added a simple "book mark" feature to the timeline that would be awesome. I'd be doing back flips over that. Not something heavy that causes stuff to rebuild and chug, just a simple way in the UI at the bottom to set nice tall flags that we can set to any color we want and leave a little note on each one, then give us a pop-up where we can quickly select one of the flags and instantly roll the history marker back to that spot.

[TrippyLighting]

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@kjav wrote:

Dragging back through a massive list of small icons at the bottom that all run together with no way to really organize them is very hard. Doing the color swipes over the top is no help to me as they still all appear totally random. The only option I see is packing them into groups, which requires you to do all edits to a given part sequentially, which isn't realistic when making assemblies w many parts based on each other.

It sounds like you are missing a key concept in Fusion 360 and that is component activation. This is described in Fusion 360 R.U.L.E #1.

This will help some. I agree that there is a lot that could be done to help making the timeline more digestible and make it easier or even possible to debug some designs (such as a dependency graph) but that'll be way down the roadmap.

[davebYYPCU]

In addition to Peter’s input, without a file to see the circumstances, your stated use on the timeline, seems very much self induced.  Took me a while to work out the Fusion logic, but

Repeatedly making additional sketch plane/s coincident to a previous one, not my cuppa....

[gts9198]

So this is just how Autodesk operates? when I used pro desktop you simply made a plane and it stuck to that plane. I am having endless issues as it chooses any angle and any direction to draw a simple line. 

choose the plane and nope doesn't draw on that plane its in the middle of nowhere hahaha. 

[g-andresen]

Hi,

simply uncheck 3D-sketch

günther

[jeff_strater]

@gts9198 - please supply a screencast showing what behavior you don't expect.  Your description is not helpful, to be honest.  If you select a plane, then 2D sketch geometry absolutely is constrained to that plane.