Hi Danny, yeah I understand what you mean. But yes that is probably tied into the "2D sketch plane" nature of MCAD type stuff.

Possibly in the NX case that you are talking about, the object is defined by an underlying 2D sketch that only has 2D coordinates in it, and then that is associated with a plane.

MoI doesn't really work like that, objects in MoI are always full 3D objects. Even when you draw 2D shapes in MoI, those are just 3D objects that happen to have z = 0.

Like you mention, that's similar to AutoCAD (and also many 3D animation systems) where there is just one large environment that you work in and not a separate "Part modeler" and "assembly modeler" as 2 different applications that you switch between.


Construction planes in MoI are not necessarily only used as a "part modeling" coordinate system, they can also be used as just a general modeling aid to help you draw stuff in a particular spot. Someone that had set a construction plane in some location to just help with some drawing could easily get surprised if they then decide to copy and later paste some other object that happened to be off to the side somewhere. That's why I don't think it is safe to reorient objects automatically when pasting as a default way of doing things.


I was thinking about it some, and what seems like it would work would be to have an additional "PastePart" command that would work the way you want. It could be set up on the right-click on Paste. There could also be a similar "ImportPart" that was set up as a right-click on File/Import for doing a similar thing but bringing the pieces in from a file you pick.


That seems like it could give you the tools to make things work similar to the kind of thing where there are separate "Part" and "assembly" workspaces like you are probably used to.


In Rhino, the way I set up cplanes originally was that they were per-viewport, where every viewport had its own cplane. In MoI I wanted to simplify this and I shifted to having just one global cplane, which seems to be working well since it should make it easier to have a "part modeling" kind of support like you had expected.

- Michael