Hi Danny, yeah it seems to be working really well.

It looks like it will be useful for several different things - certainly for sticking planes and circles together, but also for plopping down objects perpendicular to a freeform surface as well.


> How is "PastePart" activated, new icon or command via keyboard shortcut

It's by right-click on the existing Paste icon, or by keyboard shortcut. I've added in a new default shortcut for it: Ctrl+Shift+V .

So Ctrl+V to get the regular simple paste, and if you want an "paste + set position & orientation", use Ctrl+Shift+V.


> is it going to act like Import where you choose an existing
> part

PastePart just uses whatever is in the clipboard, so use Copy to put whatever part you want in the clipboard first, that's how you control what will be used.

There is a separate companion command though called "ImportPart" which you can activate by right-click on the File/Import icon. Instead of using what is in the clipboard, ImportPart prompts you for a file name, and then sucks in that file and lets you position and orient it in the same way. So if you want to set up a library of parts, you would use ImportPart to bring in one of your library items by picking its file name. In the file you can either position the part relative to the world origin and world axes, or if you have set a CPlane in the file it will use the CPlane as the source/base position.

For using the clipboard, you can either position your object being copied relative to 0,0,0 or you can set a CPlane to set the base point, before copying it to the clipboard. I think that I'm also going to make a companion command CopyClipboardBasePoint which will go as the right-click on Copy, which will prompt you to pick a base point to use for the clipboard origin point, that may be more convenient for some simple cases rather than setting the cplane.


> and where will the origin be for the part that your
> bringing in, position as modeled?

The current plan is: if you have set a CPlane, the cplane defines the part's origin and axes. If you have not set a CPlane (either in the file for ImportPart, or at the time of Copy for copy/paste) then your part origin will just be 0,0,0 with world axes.

That's the current plan anyway, I think I should have the remaining pieces functional by tommorrow.

- Michael