Zeroing out transformations?

[Bernd Meißner]

When importing assemblies from customers, these often come in (depending on the source application and the used coordinate system) with a wrong orientation, e.g. rotated around the x-axis by 90°. I rotate the whole assembly now to start working in the correct orientation. Now whenever I'm copy/pasting a part or subassembly, it's inserted in the original orientation, which means rotated around 90° back and displaced.

Is there a way to tell the whole assembly after the initial 90° rotation "this is now your zero position, forget your previous orientation"?

Bernd

[Cary OConnor]

You can rotate the Anchor of the assembly by 90 degree first. That controls to orientation of the all shapes in IronCAD when dropped from catalogs to importing.

[Bernd Meißner]

18 hours ago, Cary OConnor said:

You can rotate the Anchor of the assembly by 90 degree first. That controls to orientation of the all shapes in IronCAD when dropped from catalogs to importing.

I've done so (in the assembly properties > anchor), but the result is still the same. Copy/pasting any part inserts this part rotated back to the original position, before the anchor was rotated.

[Cary OConnor]

Try rotating the anchor in the scene with the TriBall. See video below. 

 

 

[Bernd Meißner]

Thanks, Cary,

this works when pulling parts into the catalog and then back into the scene. However, I'd have to do that individually for every single part in the complete scene, because just rotating the anchor of the top level parent doesn't change all the contained parts and sub-assemblies. It also still doesn't work when using copy/paste, when pasting the part with the corrected anchor orientation it's still placed wrong, with the original orientation.

Is there a way to change the anchor orientation of a newly imported (e.g. STEP) assembly including all parts at once? Means rotating all of them by 90° for the anchor, and then afterwards by -90° for the geometry? This would be similar to a function I know from other applications, which allows to swap or rotate axis orientation on import/export?

[Bertrand Kim]

Hi Bernd,

Could you attach the video of this issue?

Thanks

 

Kim

[Bernd Meißner]

I cannot record audio on my PC, but here is a video of the basic problem. Even if the anchor of an object or sub-assembly is correctly positioned, copy-pasting always maintains the object's relative positioning parameters to the original parent. This would be good, if copy-pasting wouldn't re-parent the object to the world, instead of the previous parent. This leads to the now incorrect position after pasting:

 

 

[Cary OConnor]

In 2022, there is a Copy in Place which will maintain the current orientation while pasting outside of the containing assembly. That is not available in 2021 however. I believe that would solve you issue of the parts moving in and out of the assembly level. You could disassemble and copy and paste as well as the parent in your simple case is at the scene level. There currently is not a global replace orientation of anchor.

[Bernd Meißner]

Well, this looks like a reason to install 2022… I've been waiting for one ;-)

I'll report back when done.

Edit: done, but I don't see the corresponding command. Where should I look for it?

Edit #2: Nevermind, found it. It took installing product update 1 before it showed up. This is exactly what I have been looking for, thanks :-)

 

 

Edited November 25, 2022 by Bernd Meißner