Make Mate Connector Ownership More Obvious

owen_sparks

Hi folks.

I love mate connectors, both for transforming things and well mating them.

I don't love how they all look the same and how they blend into each other.

If a MC is on the face of a part it all looks fine but if they offset then it can be impossible to see at a glance what is owned by what.

Even in this simple example it doesn't jump out at you as to what is native to what.



I'd like to propose an additional toggle to the "k" show/hide mates functionality that projects a dotted line from the mate to its owner. 

I think the existing measure tool in the bottom right of the screen does a great job of this for dx, dy, or dz values.

Cheers,

Owen S.

lougallo

@owen_sparks Hovering on the MC in the graphics area highlights the owner, however is the confusion more about being able to hide show by owner?

owen_sparks

Hi @lougallo and thanks for the reply.

My end goal here was to be able to get a feel for the whole assembly at a glance. 

Hovering over a part to see its mates is great but doesn't give you the big picture. 

Imagine looking at a map of towns and roads.  You don't want a blank map that displays each town one at a time when you mouse-over a list on the left side, you want to plan a route from all the information.

This could get pretty cluttered pretty quickly and we don't like changing existing behavior so my suggestion is a three stage toggle for the "k" key. 

(i) All mates on

(iii) All mates on with ownership dotted paths shown

(iii) All mates off

That way there is nothing to upset new users and they'll be led into using the new feature as it'll be displayed in their normal workflow next time they hit the "k" key. 

As for the path's themselves I'd favour  color coded dots showing the dx, dy and dz path back to the point / entity that the mate is linked to.  It'd end up looking a bit like a traditional exploded view.

Does that make any sense?

Cheers,

Owen S.

lougallo

Yes it makes sense but on screen graphics for all mate connectors can be very nice in your example but remind me of the days of show all dimensions on a complex part.  (we used to call it the harry spider   However we do plan to add more mate relationship and diagnostics as well.  It seems that a simple reference tree or better display of parent/child features like this might be a better approach.  Let's open this up for a bit more discussion..

romeograham

I like the idea of the reference tree and parent/child displays, both in Part Studios (between feautures) and in Assemblies (Assembly hierarchy / structure)!