normal to plane / surface

jon_loschke

I so often find myself needing the normal to a plane, I'm surprised it's not a built in feature.  Other CAD has this.  If I'm blind, please point it out!  

Before I go off and write a featureScript to do this, I want to see if there is a better way to do things.  Here is an example:

I need to square up a part to a plane (for some reason a context update caused it to drift from the reference).  This is for export, not assembly.
My simple thought is create two normals, one from part plane, one from reference.  Then I know angle (between normals) for rotation.  But I need axis for rotation, so I need a construct plane from the two normal vectors and then get the normal to that plane for the axis.  I did this and it worked perfectly.  Except I needed 5 sketches and 3 planes.  I needed 3 normals in that solution.  Is there a better solution?

Even if that can be done simpler, I still often need normals.  Am I out of the norm here?  (pun intended)

NeilCooke

Transform with mate connector?

owen_sparks

Heck yeah, takes care of rotation as well as translation and no calcs needed

OwS

jon_loschke

NeilCooke said:

Transform with mate connector?

Yes, thanks, that does work for the example I gave.  But I still often find myself doing constructions where it would be so much easier with a normal.  Imagine in my example that I needed that final line, not for a transform axis but some further piece of construction.  Can I create a mate and then use the Z axis as a reference line?

jon_loschke

So I'm not crazy.  Even you released a new feature that solves some of the exact cases (but not all) where I would have used a plane normal (if there were such a thing):  

MATE CONNECTOR AS AXIS