Reply To: Solid Edge Community Edn. – Gen. Qs. Thereof

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

I am impressed! Obviously I realise your speed at drawing is thanks to considerable experience and skill. I can't help thinking there is a lot more to it than that, though, and especially if you also want accurately dimensioned, scaled, printed elevations for the workshop.

Is a "native 3D program" as you call it, one working only 3D-first? If so, it must be possible to extract from the 3D model, orthogonal drawings for the workshop? It would be no use without!

I thought "layers" are basic to all CAD and photo-editing programmes, and the two generic CAD primers I have discuss them. For: defining line properties; repeating assemblies; construction by the CAD equivalent of the manual technique of laying one drawing on tracing-film over another. So do Fusion and similar have layers but under a different name, or do they use a very different method; but still to the same ends?

Fusion et al might not call them "work-planes", but you still need select the next operating facet of the 3D object; so isn't it just a rose by any other name?

Paper space and viewports are "only" TurboCAD's way to copy part of a potentially very wide Model Space region, to a standard sheet of paper at the wanted scale. (If you know how.) All CAD programmes must do something equivalent, so do others essentially use effectively a combined "Model + Paper Space", and call the scale and printer settings into that?

Your lock shows something common to most CAD examples here and in the magazines: joint-lines between the drawing's objects. Is that simply by default, primary rendering? TurboCAD also allows Adding them, e.g. to make that staple one piece. (You can't separate them again, except as an editing "Undo".) Do Fusion etc allow that?