QOL Improvement - Center Mate

[k.mccathie]

Hello Devs, 

I am posting to suggest a Quality of Life improvement to help with workflow. 

I am a previous  decades long solidworks user that has switched over to inventor for the last 3 years now, and while there were some differences between the platforms I have pretty much got everything out of inventor I used to out of Solidworks and am quite happy.

That is except for one key feature that I miss dearly and would really hope could be implemented at some point in the future;  Advanced Mate - Width Mate.

Since I need to add clearance/tolerance to many of my parts in my assemblies, I am having to spend a lot of extra time arranging parts in my assemblies centering parts between gaps, by manually entering a value; either by memory or by having to measure the gap to other side and dividing by 2. for large part assemblies this time adds up.

Solid works has a mating feature in which I can select an 2 faces of a part/sub assembly and 2 faces of another part(s) or sub-assemblies for it to sit between and it will center that object between them.

This operation is much faster than the current method I have to used and described above for inventor as it is just a few clicks and with a 3d mouse is extremely efficient. 

I am wondering if anything similar can please be added I really think it would be quite helpful for a lot of folks.

https://help.solidworks.com/2021/english/SolidWorks/sldworks/t_width_mates_swassy.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8af3QgnJlk&ab_channel=GSC

Kind Regards,

Kevin

[Gabriel_Watson]

I think most Inventor users simply add a work plane or use an origin plane to achieve that. Constrain a center plane to another center plane, no need to measure or modify later.

Vote for this idea:
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-ideas/symmetric-constraint-involving-a-width-mate-like-solid...
And this other one too:
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-ideas/width-mate/idi-p/10471934

[k.mccathie]

Except adding all the workplanes and then toggling visibility as they start to pile up and affect ability to interact with the model doesn't actually help with workflow and takes the same amount of time. I should be able to mate and select pre existing faces and edges to mate from and a simple "center between these 2 faces" couldn't be easier or faster.

If I can already add a workplane centered between 2 faces then just make that a proper constraint and take out the extra steps of adding them; just use the same process for part constraints. then im not littered with workplanes everywhere that need to be toggled on and off.