2012 sketch dimensions (videos)
There have been some improvements in SW 2012 that you may not have seen yet. Most of these are highly useful. Let’s take a look.
You already knew about the diameter/radius dimensioning, when you dimension to a centerline and then move the cursor to the far side of the centerline, you get a diameter dim, as shown by the 0.508 dim. In 2012, after you have created one dimension like this, you can just click on another line, and place the second diameter dimension.
Old workflow to create two diameter dimensions:
- click Smart Dimension
- click centerline
- click other entity
- move cursor to the opposite side of the centerline
- place the dimension
- click centerline again
- click another entity
- move cursor to the opposite side of the centerline
- place the second dimension
- click Smart Dimension
- click centerline
- click other entity
- move cursor to opposite side of the centerline
- place the dimension
- click another entity with special cursor shown above
- place second diameter dimension
So it saves 2 steps for every diameter dimension after the first one. Cool. That’s worth having and worth knowing about.
It also works for radial dimensions, or any time you want to create a baseline dimension from an existing centerline. You can’t use it to do a set of baseline dimensions from a regular sketch line or an edge, it has to be a centerline.
But there’s more.
If you press the ESC, it deselects the last selection. Very nice.
These are both in the What’s New, but I thought they deserved mention.
And here’s a bit of bad interface design, where a new drop down selection box gets in the way of the Modify box tools.
And then there are some old bugs that are still left in the software.
Using “mm” to key in millimeter dimensions in the Modify box when in an inch template, runs a hotkey associated with the M key. This is annoying.
shell using previous save states of the part
shell errors still bring up irrelevant error
modify dialog quirks and benefits
Ok, I finally found that error with the M hotkey. It’s with the Sketch Fillet property Manager. Using MM for millimeter kicks off your M hotkey instead of allowing millimeters. Definite repeatable bug.
Suggestion: Create a poll about the favorite enhancement in SW 2012.
I like a lot the new functionality on selecting all the items of the same type using CTRL+A.
Just select an entity: face, edge, vertex, body, part or assembly component, etc. and press CTRL+A. How nice! 🙂
Note: This comment has been updated.
Nice new feature. Thanks for the video.
Devon Sowell