Here's a couple of examples of the new construction line temporary plane snap.

This is a new snap that will kick in when you create 2 construction lines with the same starting point. Then when you snap a point on to that crossing location they will form a temporary automatic construction plane.

Here's an example for drawing a rectangle from center point in the 3D view, this is creating one construction line in the plane and one coming off vertically from the plane, then when placing the rectangle's center point at that spot the rectangle is aligned to the plane formed by those construction lines:





Here's another example in the 3D view, with a line and a point at some arbitrary angle, not in any world x/y/z plane. This is using the line command and by dragging out 2 construction lines from the point that then enables getting a straight snap along the surface normal of the temporary plane:




In some cases this may be quicker than setting the cplane since creating construction lines is so easy (just hold the mouse button down and drag to make one, no other type of activation needed) and since the construction lines will automatically disappear when the command finishes so there is not any resetting step needed.

If you're going to do more than one thing in that plane then you would still want to set the full cplane there instead, since that will persist until you reset it.

This new mode is only activated for something that has its base point starting right on that crossing juncture - if you need to do something like draw in the plane a little bit off to the side or something like that you need to set the cplane to do that. You can use this crossing cline step as a way to align the cplane as well though, if you set it up then place the cplane origin at that crossing location the cplane z axis will start out aligned to that normal also.


- Michael