MoI ER : Snap line / curve

 From:  Michael Gibson
1089.3 In reply to 1089.1 
Hi Lish, like you mentioned in MoI you can use a construction line to get any of those snaps that you need.

Doing them all completely automatically works great for simple blocky mechanical shapes, but at the same time it causes problems with more freeform type designs.

Here is an example - if you have a drawing with just these 4 polygons along the left:



Doing snapping the way that you show will create all of these snapping lines:



The workspace is now very dense with snapping zones, when drawing now you would not be very free to place a point just anywhere in space that you want, almost anywhere you move your mouse will be within the influence of one of those snap lines.

That greatly interferes with drawing a more freeform type curved shape where you need to fine tune the placement of each point to get the shape you want like this:



That's why MoI is intentionally designed not to do the kind of snapping that you are showing there. Instead you can get any one of those snap lines just when you need it by using the "hold down and drag" method to create a construction line there.

For mechanical design, that kind of snapping can tend to make more sense since freeform type elements just aren't very common there.

But in many ways MoI is intended to be a kind of more general design type tool, not one that is exclusively focused just on mechanical design. That's kind of why you'll see differences between MoI and a more focused mechanical tool like SolidWorks.

- Michael