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Reverse Engineering with VxModel and SOLIDWORKS – Extracting Planes

Welcome back,

Last time we spoke about reverse engineering with 3D scan and coordinate measuring machine data. The next few articles we are going to go into a deep dive in extracting entities from your scan data to send to cad and use for feature creation. We are going to start with the most fundamental feature a plane and all the ways you can extract one with VxModel.

We have a few different ways of extracting planes, think about some you do in SOLIDWORKS or other systems.

Types:

Numerical Value: This allows you to control the center and normal of the plane by typing in xyz coordinates.
Triangle Selection: The one is very straight forward. You use your mesh selection tools for flatness and get a plane from the selection. But did you know you could select both sides of a rib and it would do a mid-plane creation.

Point Selection: Here you pick center points of entities you have already extracted like center points of circles and cylinders.
Vertex Selection: Pretty self-explanatory, select any three vertices of the mesh and you have a plane.
Average Plane: Here you can select any already extracted planes and find the averaged plane between them
Plane Offset: Select a pre-existing plane and give it a distance.
Plane Offset through a point: Select a pre-existing plane and select any point be that a vertex or a point of an existing entity
Point and coplanar axis: This one I’ve used a lot for parts that have axial symmetry like fan blade & turbines. You are able to pick an axis for the plane to pivot around and then a point to stop and locate the plane off that pivot point.
Point and normal axis: This is very very similar to offset plane to a point, but this would work when you don’t have a planar surface in your model but you do a hole somewhere that you can use its axis for a direction of pull for a plane.
Mesh symmetry plane: One of the most interesting and very processor intensive commands I’ve seen. You can pick a plane on something like a rib or boss and it will find the mid-plane of the material for you. The other way would be to create a plane on both sides of the rib and do an average plane creation. That’s pretty nice.
Draw Line: This is the most free form of all the plane creation tools you draw a line by holding the ctrl key, left mouse button clicking and dragging across the screen. This will create a plane the normal of the plane is perpendicular to the line you drew and you are looking at the infinitely thin plane from its side.