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Midpoint of Two Points
zachary_oldham
Member Posts: 7 ✭
In a sketch, I have a line segment that has two points on it. These points are constrained in their position on the line segment by dimensions. I wanted to create a new point at the midpoint between these two points, and was very surprised to find that midpoint tool could not do that, and that "Midpoint constraint requires a point and a line or arc." In retrospect it makes sense given that the midpoint constraint constrains a point you select to the midpoint position of a line segment or arc you select, but it also seems like there should be an easy way to either create a new point at the midpoint of two other points, or constrain a point that already exists to the midpoint of two other points. Does this capability exist somewhere that I am unaware of? I was able to work around this by creating a new line segment between the two points and constraining a point to the midpoint of that, but it feels a bit awkward given that the two points were already on a line segment.
Comments
Concur, that is a feature Fusion has which is very nice (they have a range of mid-things you can specify, midpoint, mid plane, mid-thought, etc (ok the last one is not real but could be?) You can get around this with a kludge of creating another line with construction and use that line's midline between the points (or just make your line with the points have segments at each point.
If a point is placed on the line between the two existing points you can make the new point at midpoint between the original two points by selecting the two original points and then the new point and assign the midpoint constraint to it. - Scotty
I find that when placing points on lines, it's often better to use split rather than point. Then, downstream operations can use either the midpoint or the equals constraint.
As @robert_scott_jr_ said, you can actually do this fine if you select the two end points first and the midpoint.
@wayne_sauder also brings up a good point where split does provide more flexibility.
That is good to know! Thank you all. I suppose that changes my request to "make it more clear that you can do this with the midpoint constraint"
This is very good to know, thank you @wayne_sauder. I suppose that means my real request is that this should be mentioned in the docs, as unless I am missing something obvious it does not appear to be (this is what I am looking at)
Definite upgrade needed for the help-files here - currently no mention of this functionality. Not even a single example given which shows that selecting 'three' things is even an option.
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@eric_pesty nailed it as usual. My guess on why it's a "hidden capability" is that it was needed for the center point rectangle tool constraints (that's where I learned about this), and was otherwise not the intended use. I find myself using it this was somewhat often though. @CADNurd another 3-selection one is symmetry. For both of these I don't think the selection order matters, but the starting positions do, as the solver finds the nearest solution.
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