> Relocate Cline, Reorient Cline and Project Next Point.

Just for other people listening in - these options show up if you click and hold down for a moment on the little bullet that pops up after you create a construction line.


> Maybe I'm missing something or maybe they just aren't very applicable to the type
> of jewelry modeling that I do.
> Could you briefly give an example of how they might come into play when drawing in MoI?

They're pretty specialized, but pretty cool for the right situations.

Relocate is mostly useful for doing constructions involving parallel lines. For example, let's say that you want to freehand draw a second polyline to this one with a parallel middle segment:



Using a relocated construction line you can do this all in one single polyline command - start polyline, drag a construction line along the middle segment, then relocate it to where you want the parallel and now you can snap on to it for the 2nd and 3rd points of your polyline:



Certainly it would be possible to create this same thing with other methods, such as copying or offseting the line and then extending it, etc... But those would involve a lot more steps - the relocated cline lets you do parallel line constructions with fewer steps all within one command.


Reorient lets you treat a construction line as a kind of measuring stick where you can capture a distance and then point the line in some other direction to apply that distance somewhere else. Here's an example - here is a block:



Let's say that we want to draw a cylinder on top of this block and we want to locate its center to be inset from the edge with half of the distance of the edge. You can do this all within one shot of the cylinder command by using a reoriented cline. To do this, start the cylinder command, and before you pick the first point, drag a construction line from the midpoint of the edge to the endpoint:



We have now "captured" the distance that we want to use with the cline. Now re-orient the cline to point perpendicular to the edge:



Now you can snap on to the "endpoint" of the cline (the endpoints of the cline are the 2 points you used to define the cline) to get the point you're after. Also the midpoint of the cline is a nice proportion here as well:



Then let's say you want the height of that cylinder to be the same as the height of block - to do this I did another construction line along one of the vertical edges of the block and used "relocate" to place it at the center point, that now gives me a top point to snap to:



So that is a cylinder drawn directly "in place" using different proportions that were captured from the block using clines.

This kind of enables a different style rather than snapping stuff on to the grid - instead these methods let you freehand draw the base object not grid snapped to any particular dimensions, then use construction lines to measure stuff on the fly, kind of like a temporary adaptive grid.

I'll cover some uses of cline point projection in another post in a minute.

- Michael