Selecting a sketch plane.

[micromelt01]

Not quite a beginner but almost. I have been trying for hours to sketch on an offset plane only to find the sketch buried deep within my model on another plane. So now I discover in this forum that by turning off 'Allow 3D sketching of lines' in Preferences that things are much easier. Great. But I also discovered in desperation, before the change in Preferences, that I can select the correct plane outside of the model and by holding down CTRL draw my sketch on the desired plane. It works just like in the JOINTS command. Now this might be a feature that everybody knows and I have missed but I have not seen it in all my efforts viewing videos and searching forums. Can I see this documentation somewhere?

[davebYYPCU]

That does not sound right.  Holding Control down, stops auto constraining when sketching.

Need the model to see where this outside plane is, and

a better description of what you want to do, and what did not happen.

File > Export, and attach it on the next message.

[micromelt01 · Accepted solution]

Hi Dave,

I have made a simple model and it seems to work here as well.

With ' Allow 3D sketching....' in Preferences/Design ticked proceed as follows.

First Create sketch and select front face of orange body. Select circle tool and it is possible, when moving over the surface to idavertently select an inner feature as the centre point. More so if the model is complicated.

Now Create sketch, Select front face and circle tool and move tool to snap to an intersection on the drawing plane grid outside the model and then hold down CTRL you can now move the circle tool over the face of the model without selecting geometries not on the front plane.

Effectively you have turned off the ' Allow 3D sketching....' for just this sketch.

Is that useful? I don't know. It sounds consistent with your explanation of stopping auto constraining.

regards,

David

[davebYYPCU]

Firstly I see nothing unusual in the file so far.

No Circles.

There is no orange body. (Origin and work planes are orange)

There are only planar sketches in it.

First tip, use Eyeballs to narrow down what to select.  In other words hide what you don't need to get in your way.

3d Sketches - all sketches are 3d, have advanced use cases

but you can make a sketch to be planar, (some call these 2d sketches),

has way more functionality and these are regarded as normal.

So with that said, if you "are" allowing 3d sketching, tick in the Sketch Pallet is on, 

selecting any point in the model that is visible is normal behaviour, it's up to you to select what you need.

Hide the clutter, will prevent inadvertent selections

Might help....