computational-geometrysolidworks

In solidworks, is there a way to get the direction cosines of a surface normal?

I have a system with an assortment of planes and lines. In order to compare to other models, it would be a lot easier if I could deal with the directions (or direction cosines) of the normals to various surfaces. Is there a way to easily get this out of Solidworks?

I can pull out angles between various construction planes, but this means there is a lot of extra calculations to get the surface normals. The angles it returns are calculated for planes that are created to contain projections of the lines, which tends to complicate things.

Thanks for your time.

John

Solution

  • To get the normal vector to a surface you can use the Normal property if the face is flat or EvaluateAtPoint if it's not.