Creating Automatic Planar Sections

This task shows how to create planar sections from a digit along the 3 directions of any axis system in a few clicks.
Open the Cloud.CATPart model from the samples directory.

  1. Click XYZ Automatic Planar Sections in the Scan Creation toolbar, and select the Element to cut.

    • The elements to cut can be clouds of points, meshes, surfaces, or volumes.
    • Volumes and surfaces are automatically tessellated within the command, with an editable Sag value.
    • Multi-selection is available.
    • A contextual menu is available once you have selected one element

      or several
      • Click to display the list of elements selected.
      • Click an element in the graphic area or in the specification tree to add it to the selection list.
        You can also select an element in the list, and click Remove or Replace to modify the selection list.
      •  Click Close to end the selection and revert to the main dialog box.

  2. If some elements selected are volumes or surfaces, they are tessellated. Sag becomes available. Edit it if necessary.

Whenever you modify the Sag value, the tessellation is restarted.
 

  1. Define the Influence area according to your needs.
    For clouds of points, the Influence area parameter defines a computation area around the cutting planes: when the points are not dense, a cutting plane (black line) may be unable to intersect the points. The Influence area is the area shown in yellow that contains the points considered to intersect the cutting plane.

  2. Select the axes to take into account to compute the planar sections.
By default, all three axes are selected.
They refer to the current axis system, either the default standard axis system or any axis system you have set as current.

  1. Select or clear Auto-range, according to your needs:
    • By default, Auto-range is selected, and the Start and Stop values are adjusted automatically for each direction, depending on the elements selected.
    • Clear Auto-range to input your own Start and Stop values, to create the planar sections only on a portion of the selected elements.

  2. Define the Offset from the axis system origin along each axis, and the Step between planar sections.

  3. For each axis, select the Color to apply to the planar sections created in that direction from the list.
    The cutting planes in each direction are displayed in the graphic area.
You need to click Apply to display your changes on clouds of points, while they are dynamically displayed on tessellations.
 

  1. When you are satisfied, select an output option

    and click OK to validate and create the planar sections as explained in Creating Planar Sections.