Centering 2D Objects, Offsets

Altair Forum User
Altair Forum User
Altair Employee
edited October 2020 in Community Q&A

Make a rectangle. Make another inside it, small that the first. How does one easily center the inner rectangle  to the outer rectangle? Perhaps I want to center side-to-side, top-to-bottom or both.

 

How about circles?

 

Say I want a circle offset from the corner of a rectangle? Is there a nice way to that?

 

I'm working from engineering drawings for electronic components. I draw the outer rectangle of, say, a miniature LCD display and I want to everything relative to the outer rectangle.

 

Thanks ahead of time,

 

ark

 

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Answers

  • ArjunA_22390
    ArjunA_22390
    Altair Employee
    edited January 2015

    Hi mbellon,

     

    If you have the drawings in .dwg format, you can import them into Evolve. The imported elements will retain their features.

     

    Evolve currently does not support constraints. 

    However, there are alternate ways to get the result you need. This is not the best solution but the only one currently.

    1. Curve offset is a tool which can be used to create concentric curve objects.
    2. To create a circle offset from a corner of a rectangle- Use the segment from center tool (under line group set) to create a line segment with the corner of the rectangle as its center. With 45 degree azimuthal angle and an end point co-ordinate of 3,3,0 ( where 3 is the assumed offset distance, as an example). Using snap to points or snap to end point, you can snap the center of a circle to the end of this line segment. The circle will now be 3 units from the rectangle corner.

    I am pretty sure you have tried some of these methods by the time I write this.

  • Altair Forum User
    Altair Forum User
    Altair Employee
    edited January 2015

    Not being to center relative to circles and rectangles is unfortunate. Please see about getting this kind of thing into 2015. It's not that hard and allows 2D diagrams to be built in Evolve. Many electronic components come with 2D drawings in their data sheets - nothing else - and I have to model them myself.

    Working from diagrams one often starts with 2D drawings and must push things around in 2D before doing extrudes and such.

     

    May I suggest you take a look at Vectric VCarvePro? Their flush and center tools? Their 2D stuff is... delightful. Evolve should be good at 2D too!

     

    Yes, the old bisect an angle was what I landed up with. Using relative coordinates it was easy to hit where I needed to be.

     

    Concentric was obvious for circles... if it was build that way. If I made a circle it would nice to select it, select a target circle and say center.

     

    Thanks!

     

    --mark

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