Trouble aligning mesh body

[bspiegelman]

hi community,

Digging into the wonderful world of working with meshs. 

I have a model of a sculpture which I'm going to rough in on my 3 axis mill. I split the original mesh with the split "Plane Cut feature", modifying the angle of the plane so it was optimal for where I want to put the seam. Suffice it to say, this angle is no longer on axis with the origin plane and as a result, the piece has a flat surface which is off axis.

I'd love to be able to place this on the origin plan to setup milling.

I've been digging in and can't find a solution, though I understand that there are a lot of new mesh tools in the kit so I'm feeling like there must be something. 

I'm attaching 1/2 of the sculpture, which was exported from the original file to try to preserve a little of the IP of the artist. The off-axis-ness of the mesh has been preserved here.

Thanks for any help in advance. 

[jhackney1972 · Accepted solution]

I move the mesh body so the flat surface is on the X-Y Plane of the origin.  I hope this is what you wanted.  Model is attached.

[bspiegelman]

Thank you for doing that!

Can you post a quick explainer of how you did that?

[jhackney1972]

All mesh bodies are enclosed in a bounding box and I do not know where the bounding box is to the mesh.  So I used the Measure command and the move command.  The video will explain. 

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[bspiegelman]

Hi John,

Thank you so much for the video, I appreciate the time and care. 

Aside from moving it to the origin, Im also having trouble aligning that flat face to be co-planer with the origin plane. 

When I made the original slice, it was off axis with the origin plane (the optimal place to cut this thing was not co planer to the origin plane).

Is there a way to do that? 

I was thinking about making a construction plane which matched that plane and putting the mesh and the construction plane into a componant? But I can't get that to work. 

Thanks again for the time. 

Ben

[bspiegelman]

Hi John,

I did find a workaround using another tool, which I am going to post here in case someone else has the same issue. 

Here's how I split the mesh in half and aligned the new face to the origin plane.

• Create new component containing the mesh body.
• Used the "Create mesh section sketch" tool, to place my desired slicing plane. (This not as optimal as the purpose build tool "Plane cut" tool bc it doesn't remove the upper half of the mesh as you adjust the plane, but it works)
• Open this sketch and draw a triangle on this face (necessary because there are no selectable points on the mesh-sketch)
• Make a construction plane parallel to the origin plane using offset plane set to 0 (this may not be necessary, my xy origin object was greyed out for some reason) 
• Use the Align tool to align the triangle sketch to the new construction plane.
• Use the construction plane to orient the Plane Cut tool, to get your slices. 

However, I am a complete newb and would love to know how a seasoned pro would handle this. I can see a scenario where I am handed a mesh that I need to align and can't use the below method.

I guess what I'm after is some way to grab/snap to vertices in the mesh, to translate it's wiley mesh-ness into something more Autodesk-y.

Any input would be greatly appreciated. 

Ben

[feldman_itai01]

I am struggling with a similar issue of being able to align a mesh body flat on the plane but cannot figure out how to do so. 

[bspiegelman]

A follow up from me: ultimately, I found its good to get the mesh aligned
to a WCS in a mesh based program (ie flat), there is yet to be a good way
to "grab" the mesh, though I suspect that is coming (or exists and I don't
know about it).

If the mesh is already aligned, you can put it into a component and add a
sketch or construction object into the same componant and move the whole
shebang using that as a handle.