Draft > Set working plane > [Auto] does the same as [View]

[ariel-co]

Hello,

I'm trying to add a Draft Dimension to measure the height of an arbitrary object (say, the cone in the attached file), but it turns out that the points are projected onto the working plane even with snapping on (that's a matter for a separate post). “Fine”, I say, “I'll unset the w. plane meanwhile”. The documentation says:

• To set the workplane to an existing face: select a face of an existing object in the 3D view, then press the Draft SelectPlane.png SelectPlane button
• Pressing the VIEW button will set the working plane as the view plane, perpendicular to the camera axis and passing through the (0,0,0) origin point.
• Pressing the NONE will unset any current working plane. The next 2D operations will be view-dependent.

But the last button is actually [Auto], and it has the same effect as [View] as far as I can tell (the grid becomes upright and parallel to my viewport), including the effect on the Dimension tool. Is that what it's supposed to do?


OS: Ubuntu 14.10
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.16.4928 (Git)
Branch: master
Hash: d8f63bcfd10301f3d1e141cced4370f0782238d0
Python version: 2.7.8
Qt version: 4.8.6
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 6.8.0.oce-0.17

[yorik]

The difference is that "View will set the working plane to the current view, and it will stay there afterwards, while "Auto" will adapt to the view each time you change the view.

Aa for the dimension points being projected on the working plane, that is because there is a snap icon ("WorkingPlane") for that that is probably turned on, that you must turn off

And indeed the doc is wrong, I just corrected that.

[ariel-co]

Thanks Yorik, I noticed the Snap to WP button late yesterday.

I managed to get a dimension the height of the truncated cone by constraining the second point, but:

• Seeing the vertex preselected and highlighted led me to think it would be the actual starting point. Maybe some visual clue could be added to hint the projection, like a dashed line going to the working plane and the actual position?
• The wiki page should say “tap / press once X, Y, Z after the first point to constrain the next one on the given axis relative to the working plane”. This confused me for longer than I'll admit and I'm not sure it's useful in most cases.
  

  

  dimension constrained to working plane.png (39.56 KiB) Viewed 2915 times

• The axis constraint remains after setting the second point, which results in a confusing dotted (extension?) line though the dimension line passes through the first point:
  

  

  dimension label constrained.png (61.8 KiB) Viewed 2915 times

  What does it mean?

There are other things that I'm not sure work the same every time, but I'll wait until any doubts are cleared.