Unexpected position of the sketch origin

[ben_eitel]

I am currently struggling with an unexpected behavior when creating a sketch on a self-defined plane or redefining the sketch plane of a sketch. In both cases, the origin does not appear where I would expect it (and how it worked in the past). If I redefine the sketch plane, I can even see the sketch in the expected position in the preview (in agreement the expected position of the origin) but after pressing OK the sketch is back at the unexpected position.

This what I've done:

1. I've created a first sketch with two lines. The second line is perpendicular to the first line and centered to the end of the first line.

2. I've constructed a plane with at angle 89.5 degree using the second line

3. I've created a sketch on the constructed plane that contains a simple rectangle figure. My assumption was that the origin of this new sketch should be positioned at the connecting point of line 1 and line 2 of the first sketch. This is at least how it worked in the past. Instead, the origin is placed somewhere below.

4. I've tried to redefine the sketch plane an apply the intended constructed plane once again to the sketch. The screenshots below show what happened. Only in the preview, the figure is shifted to the expected origin.

I'm looking forward to your ideas to solve this issue.

[TheCADWhisperer]

@ben_eitel 

Can you File>Export your *.f3d file to your local drive and then Attach it here to a Reply?

[laughingcreek]

I've just noticed the behavior recently also.  previously  the origin would be at the center of the bounding box of what ever was used to create the plane (mid point of a line for plane at an angle, center of face when on a body etc) or if plane along path it would be where the path intersected with the plane.  now it appears to be located at the point where the model origin would be projected in.  this is a pretty big change in behavior.  I'm wondering if it's a bug that was introduced when they fixed how the origin was located on planes offset from origin planes.  I much prefer to be able to have control over where the origin would be, particularly for plane at an angle and plane along path.

@jeff_strater , could you comment (or tag someone who can)?

[ben_eitel]

Hi @TheCADWhisperer,

Here's the 3fd file. Let me know if you can reproduce the issue.

The behavior was definitely different in the past (and I hope that the good old days come back in this regard ;-))

Best regards,

Ben

[etfrench]

The latest update changed so the origin of new sketch is the same as the main origin.  This is not a good thing.  There should at least be an option to select which to use.

[ben_eitel]

Somehow, I am not able to contact the Autodesk support team. I always get the following message: "Request can't be completed. Sorry, something went wrong while processing your request. Please try submitting again."

Do you know how to contact the development team and create awareness of this issue?

[TrippyLighting]

Do you know how to contact the development team and create awareness of this issue?

---

@Phil.E 

[Phil.E]

Hi,

This was an intentional change to address concerns that have been voiced by customers for several years now.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-design-validate/sketch-origin-not-aligned-to-model-origin/...

Recently this was also reported by Fusion Insiders on the insider portal. 

Unfortunately the action resulted in some unintended results. We are well aware of the impact for some customers and are working to correct the behavior so that every customer can use sketches effectively.

Thanks for posting and bringing up your concerns!

[ben_eitel]

Hi @Phil.E,

Thank you for your immediate reply. Let me add a few comments.

• I understand and also believe it is reasonable to have a consistent behavior of sketches. Nevertheless, this is a big change that is likely to cause a lot of confusion in near future. There are many tutorial videos in the Internet showing the old behavior.
• Existing sketches in designs seem to be (fortunately!) unchanged in behavior. On the other hand, new sketches in existing designs are now following the new behavior. This may cause additional confusion to users and complicate the maintenance of existing designs.
• The preview still shows the old behavior. I believe this is a bug that should be fixed soon. 

As @etfrench pointed out, an option to select which behavior to use, would definitely help to solve the issues above. Please take this proposal into consideration.

---

Last but not least, let me express my thanks to you and your team for quickly solving the disappearing sketch palette issue. I was also struggling with it. 

[laughingcreek]

@Phil.E - I think the programmers must have miss understood the complaints about the origin behavior in sketches.  the primary complaint was concerning offsetting a plane from an ORIGIN plane, and placing a sketch in that.  in that case the sketch origin was being placed at a weird number up the positive axis (I can't remember the exact values now, this was some years ago that I was first posting about this.  but internally fusion was using a set arbitrary value, somewhere aground 22mm, for the length of an origin axis, and then placing the origin at half that, around 11.5mm.  or so it was explained at the time).  so the origin was appearing slightly off from the model origin.  it was weird and confusing. 

the entirely predictable behavior of  the origin being placed in the bounding center of faces (for sketches on faces) or midpoints of lines (for plane at and angle) or at the path insertion pt (for plane along path) was never a complaint and also useful.  it's kinda odd and disturbing that such a huge change would be made with little fanfare. 

[Phil.E]

@laughingcreek 

Understood, that's why we are looking at fixing what was done. The original ticket was logged with only the origin plane relationship in question. The fix was applied globally for some reason, and wasn't supposed to be a "big change", but it was. Please let me apologize for not testing it more thoroughly myself before it was released.

@ben_eitel 

Thanks for your comments. We are working on it.

[laughingcreek]

FYI-todays product update's "what's new" post says-

• We fixed an issue causing the Sketch origin to appear in an unexpected location.

does seem to be fixed for plane along path, but not for plane at an angle (the one I care about) or for plane on a face.

[ben_eitel]

I can confirm that it still does not work as expected for plane at an angle.

@Phil.E, can you please have another look? Thank you.

[Phil.E]

Please provide a design file.

The original ticket was intended to fix only one case: when a plane at angle is attached to the origin. It was previously not projecting the actual origin into the sketch. Sometimes it was off by fraction of a millimeter.

Unfortunately they "fixed" it by projecting the top level origin for every sketch in a design. They have started to correct it, but only by fixing plane on path. We need more examples of designs where the "new" method is completely wrong. Thanks for the time and patience.

[laughingcreek]

you really need examples of the broken functionality?  I thought the problem was understood?  oh well, attached is an example, but if you need more you can pick any line or edge, put a plane at an angle on it and create a sketch.  could probably generate 100 examples fairly quickly.

before the programmers recently broke the functionality with a fix to the apparently poorly understood problem, this would place the origin of the sketch at the center of the line or edge.  it also aligned the sketch axis with the edge instead of the origin axis. hopefully you can see in the example why that would be preferable to where it is now.   

the original problem wasn't that the origin was off by some random amounts.  it was off by 11.125mm.  half of 22.25mm, which the programmers used to represent the length of the axis in the program internally.  a number not accessible to the user.  this was explained on the forum years ago, and was a problem from day one.  I guess the originals tickets were lost?

fyi, sketch on a face has the same (new) problem.  haven't checked the other types of plans, but I suspect they are all wacked.

[Phil.E]

No idea what this is showing me

A plane, created at an angle, and coincident with the origin, produces a sketch with an origin that is coincident with the origin.

This was not always the case, and was the intended target of the "fix".

[ben_eitel]

Hi Phil,

Sorry for my late reply on that matter. Mr. Mittl from Autodesk CTS stepped into contact with me. He wrote that a Jira ticket (FUS-147815) has been created and that you have increased the priority of this ticket. I'm glad to hear that. Before closing this process here, let me provide another explanation / figures for the example provided by@laughingcreek.
Figure 1 shows the process of creating a new plane at an angle of a line (edge of a created object).

Figure 2 shows what happens when creating a new sketch on the new plane of Figure 1. The position of the origin of the sketch created on the new plane has changed after the Fusion360 software update. This has caused a lot of confusion and changed the way of how I treat sketch origins in Fusion 360. I hope that it will be possible in future to either freely select the sketch origin or at least select from a dropdown list the behavior where the sketch origin will be placed.

Thank you for your understanding and support in this matter.   
Figure 1Figure 2   

[laughingcreek]

@ben_eitel - thanks for stepping in and explaining this.  I was to frustrated to do it.  hopefully we'll see this get fixed soon.

[Phil.E]

Thanks for taking the time to answer this. I've sent the message to the sketch team.