The recent discussion about viewing triggered by @Mitch Greenberg prompts me to share something that others may find useful.
Sometimes you want to change the view and would like to use an existing coordinate system rather than the global one to act as reference for the front/back/top views etc. There is a utility (view/8 standard views in local CS) but I wanted something to work like the standard view definitions on the Home toolbar so I produced this set of utilities I called "Local View"
The picture below may be readable but it is illustrating the "Local View" toolbar icons and I have turned off the standard ones as the local view can use the global coordinate system to give "default" behavior.
In addition to using a coordinate system as reference there are times you want to use an existing object, element, surface etc as a reference for the viewing - so these "Local View" functions can use almost anything. When you want to use an object to reference the viewing, you probably want to automatically centre the object, orientate the view and use the object as the rotation centre without doing lots of clicks and picks, so these are all options in these functions, controllable through the options menu that is brought up by the cogwheel icon. There are times when having the view icons only on the home toolbar is not adequate and you copy them to the quick access toolbar, the same can be done with the "Local View" icons or you can activate a floating window (type ajh_view()) so that they are always on screen - also illustrated in the picture below.
As the local views can be defined using objects, and the Right Mouse Button drop downs are object dependent it seemed appropriate to also add Local View into the RMB dropdowns. This is also illustrated below, Note that the RMB extensions in this zip also contain the extensions that @Darrel Sinclair wrote for group highlighting etc and included in the shareware utilities, these are nice so it seemed appropriate to copy them into the xml files in this zip to save you doing it.
OK enough words - download the zip and follow the readme in it, I tried vary hard to make this easy(even for those that do not have write access to the Patran installation folder).
Please, let me know what you think of it if you use it, any things you would like to change/add etc of course I may never find time to do any of them. It may inspire you to write your own PCL that does what you want and is better to use than this - if so please share it.
This is windows 2018 version but will probably work fine with earlier 64 bit Patran window versions.
Attached Files (1)
