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Constraining two sets of circles with a common midpoint
dev_scally425
Member Posts: 2 ✭
Hi folks. I hope the title makes sense. I'm not sure to describe what I'm looking for, but hopefully it becomes clear with the aid of a screenshot.
So I get this situation a lot, where I have a pair of circles (small circles), and then I want to draw a second set of circles (bigger circles) but have them constrained to share the same midpoint distance with the smaller set. I know I can draw two lines between both of them and find the midpoints and work backwards but that gets messy with lines on top of lines. I can also just workout the distances i need, but then they are not constrained, so future editing means i have to work out my distances again. I want o leave it so that if I need to change the dimension between the two bigger circles, that they will stay centred between the two smaller circles and vice versa.
I feel there is a really easy and obvious solution to this problem but I cant figure it out. Cracking this would really speed up my workflow.
Please help.
Comments
Use construction lines between the two left and two right circles and set them equal length
eric's suggestion is good but if you want one less line… draw a vertical construction line between the circles. set each circle on one side with a mirror constraint to the other side.
The Midpoint constraint will also work with 3 points (centers and the origin also count). You could make something that looks less cluttered that way, but I just tend to use centerlines. They're easier for another engineer or future-me to figure out what I intended without looking carefully through the constraints.