Paste NEW messes up a tangent plane

[RogerInHawaii]

I have a conical surface on which I placed a Tangent Plane, centered quite nicely on that surface.

An overhead view shows that the plane is nicely centered along the vertical center of the conical surface.


I then created a Sketch using that plane.


When that sketch is extruded into the Component it creates a nice little "notch" at the bottom of the Component.

then

So far, all is well. There are NO WARNINGS anywhere in the timeline.

I then make sure that I have this Component (ConeShingleUpperMaster) selected as active, and do a Copy operation.

I then Activate the overall project and do a Paste NEW.

A dialog pops up, BUT the first thing I notice is that the tangent plane (on the NEW-ly copied component) that I had created for the notch sketch seems out of place, angled and shifted to the left. The original plane is light yellow, the copied plane is gray. SOMETHING VERY WEIRD.

In the dialog I select the ROTATE Move Type, select the main axis of the project, 60 degrees to rotate, and Capture Position.

That results in this...

And as you can see, the tangent plane that I had defined in the original component for use by the notch sketch is WRONG in the NEW copy of the component, it's weirdly displaced, with the corresponding sketch also displaced.

Here's an overhead view of what the tangent plane looks like in the COPY.

That tangent plane is SUPPOSED to be centered on the surface, but instead it's somehow SHIFTED off to the left edge of the surface.

I've tried all sorts of approaches and nothing works. The tangent plane always gets weirdly shifted in any PasteNEW of a copy of the original.

I've attached a copy of the project to this message. It has JUST the original Component, so you can try the Copy/PasteNEW and see how weird the tangent plane ends up.

The Component is called "ConeShingleUpperMaster".
The plane Construction is called "PlaneForBottomNotchMiddle".
The Sketch is called "ConeShingleBottomNotchMiddle".

[jeff_strater]

@RogerInHawaii, that tangent plane is under-constrained.  If you look at the original in the component, the "Reference Plane" input is unselected:

Meaning:  that tangent plane is sort of free to rotate anywhere around that cone.  What Paste New does is, essentially, paste the entire feature recipe of the source into the timeline, where it is then recomputed.  That tangent plane in the new version is still satisfying the requirements it has been given - it is, indeed, tangent to the cone.  My guess is if you go back and re-create that plane with a reference to a plane (inside the component), that Paste New will do the right thing.

[RogerInHawaii]

Thank you for the quick response.

Certainly not having selected a reference plane could indeed cause the symptoms I'm seeing, but I swear, I DID select a reference plane, from the origin set of reference planes for the Component. I see, as you found, that bringing up the Edit Feature dialog for that plane shows nothing selected as the Reference Plane field of the dialog. So, I once again, using that Edit Feature dialog, attempted to select the reference plane...

But it wouldn't accept that. It left the Reference Plane field in the dialog at "Select" instead of saying "1 Plane Selected". Maybe the same thing happened when I originally created the plane and I just didn't notice that it actually didn't accept it.

Does this dialog NOT ACCEPT actual origin planes as reference planes? Does it require some existing flat surface or another defined plane to be specified?

[jeff_strater]

OK, you might be on to something there.  I just tried it out on a simple case myself, and see the same thing you do.  Let me investigate, but that UI is misleading, and I'd call that a bug.  Thanks for pointing that out.

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

Oh wow, yeah, that is a bad bug.  Turns out, it is particular to cones.  It completely ignores the reference plane completely.  Cylinders work fine!  Thanks, again, for pointing that out, glad to have that logged.

FUS-44991

[RogerInHawaii]

Any idea when that bug might be addressed and a correction distributed?

Short of that, do you have any suggestions as to how I can circumvent the problem, maybe take a different approach to getting those notches into the Component? The Tangent Plane approach was all I could come up with.

[RogerInHawaii]

Jeff, I figured out a way to make those notches without using Tangent Planes. It was a bit more complicated and the notches aren't "quite" precise but, as we used to say decades ago when I contracted to the Navy, "Good enough for government work".

Can you let me know if they ever do get a fix for that Tangent Plane issue?

And, thank you for all your help. It's much appreciated. I'll tag your reply as "Solution", even though someone else needs to actually fix the bug.

[jeff_strater]

Yes, @RogerInHawaii, will do.  I filed the bug as high priority, because it simply does not work.  I can't promise a delivery date, of course, and things always take longer than they should...

I struggled for a while trying to come up with a good workaround, and I had a hard time doing so.  It was like back in middle school when I was convinced I was going to solve the Angle trisection problem.  There must be a way to do this...

[RogerInHawaii]

HA! I, too, played around with the trisector problem a long time ago. I had come across a book called "The Trisectors" and was intrigued. But its emphasis was on the PEOPLE who thought they had or could find a solution rather than the actual issue itself. The author noted a couple of times that a full explanation was beyond the scope of his book but, man, he sure spent a lot of time talking about people who thought they had a solution.

[mavigogun]

The ability to select a Reference Plane and not just a Face seems like it could be super useful for dynamically orienting stuff.  That said, the relationship to the Reference Plane follows the logic of the Timeline- so any change to the Referenced Plane- say, a Body Face -would needs be made before the Reference Plane was created for the orientation to translate to the Construction.

[davebYYPCU]

My workaround would be Plane on a Path, 

Project the Botton edge of the Component, to a sketch aligned between the axis and the mid point of the face.  ( Bisecting Side view).  Use the projected line as source for the new plane.

If the that is not an option, the project the face, and use Plane at Angle.

Might help....

[RogerInHawaii]

What I did to finally, successfully, create those notches so that they would be properly replicated in all PasteNEW operations was to forget about Tangent Planes. Instead, I created a plane flat against the bottom of the component and then created a sketch on that plane with, basically, three lines drawn on it, one "tangent" to the middle of the bottom edge of the component (for where the middle notch would go), one "tangent" to the left part of the bottom edge of the component (for the left notch), and one for the right notch.

I then created three more planes, Angle Planes, using the corresponding lines from that three-line sketch as the basis for the plane, and making the plane basically 90 degrees angled, so that it's 90 degrees to that bottom plane. I COULD have made those angled planes to effectively be aligned with the angle of the cone, but decided that the 90 degree angle would work OK. Then for each of those planes I created a sketch of the related notch, making sure they were each fully constrained, and then Extruded those notches through the Component.

And it all worked out fine. No problems with Copy/Paste or Copy/PasteNew or Pattern.

So, I was able to work around the error in Fusion 360 regarding Tangent Planes on cone shaped objects. ( whew )