Can someone help please ?

[LScholz]

I have spent a considerable amount of time using CoCreate Personal Edition.
It worked OK for simple things, but now I am trying to do something a bit more complex.

There are some things I am at a loss to resolve.

1) How do I create a point at the centre of a circle (or arc) ? Help says "Click Aux Geo" in the main menu. Well - there is no "Aux Geo", or at least I could not find it...

There are many brilliant features in CoCreate - and almost as many ones which are extremely annoying. The way I see it - there is no explicit way of modeling 3D objects without going through workplanes and 2D construction geometry. It appears rather strange to me that a point in 3D can't be explicitly created - or am I getting something terribly wrong ?

[wathavy]

Hi.

You can use Shft+Ctrl and pick the circle you want to pick the center point of.

[BMaverick]

Toshi, Thanks! I learned something about pick a center point of a circle via the keyboard.

Mainly, I would use the "CATCH" menu bar's pull down of "CENTER"

[Andy Poulsen]

You may already know this, but this technique also works in Modeling (in addition to Annotation) for both 2D and 3D edges: arcs, circles, even straight edges/lines. When you hold down Ctrl-Shift, you're temporarily changing the catch setting to "Center" -- so you'll catch the center point of the circles and arcs, and the midpoint of the straight sections.

You can visually see this when you have any command open that's looking for a point input (such as move by 2 points, etc). Just hold down Shift-Ctrl and watch how the flyby highlighting changes as you move over different element types.

I hope this helps!

andy

[LScholz]

Thanks :)
This certainly helps.

[John Scheffel]

There are many brilliant features in CoCreate - and almost as many ones which are extremely annoying. The way I see it - there is no explicit way of modeling 3D objects without going through workplanes and 2D construction geometry. It appears rather strange to me that a point in 3D can't be explicitly created - or am I getting something terribly wrong ?
I wouldn't say terribly wrong, but I don't think creating 3D points in space or 3D primitives without 2D geometry (blocks, spheres, cones, etc) is of much value for efficient model creation. If you could post why you want to do those things the forum members may be able to suggest better ways to accomplish your goal.

[BMaverick]

Here's a list of how I would use 3D points.

Points in 3D space not on a WP would offer the ability generate 3D splines that pass through the points that do not share the same planes with one another. This can make fabricating piping easy to do.

Generating a curve from a file would be defined by 3D points. This is greatly used in the turbine industry.

A 3D helix that is cone shaped can be driven by 3D points.

3D points can allow geometry to be lofted/sweep with guide curves and a non-planar profile.

3D points can control a multiple plane circular pattern given the vector direction.

A 3D point would offer the ability to develop cones that can be skewed if the point is allowed to move it's position.

A 3D point can provide tangency between two parts whose surfaces touch at an interection point or edge.

Points can also be a reference mark for some distance in space to measure or scale to or even allow things to be dragged and dropped to the defined 3D point location.

With our other CAD systems here, the 3D points assist with CMM data of parts produced and compared back to the original model made at nominal conditions in respect to GD&T datums and target datums.