Welcome back for another CATIA Tip in a Minute or Less. The focus of this series is to offer a quick tip that’ll save a few seconds of your time. Maybe some small tweaks to something you do every day will add up to a lot saved future headaches.
Here’s a pretty common scenario: You need to start a sketch for a part – maybe it’s a block – and to get everything nice and organized, you’ve got to center it. So, you go in, build a rectangle, and immediately head over to constraint and create symmetries about the V and H axis of the sketch. It’s not necessarily hard to do, but it does take a sequence of several steps.
Here’s Centered Rectangle to the rescue. This one is pretty easy: Dig into the Rectangle flyout, and the Centered Rectangle will be hiding one spot from the right. Click the command, choose a center point, then click one more time to get the size the rectangle. The rectangle is automatically constrained around the center point.
The constraints might look a little different than usual. These are midpoint constraints -- essentially just symmetries about a point instead of a center line. Enable the auto dimensions at the same time and you can easily get fully-constrained centered rectangles with minimal effort.
For a deeper look into the Sketcher workbench (including the other Rectangle options), check out the CATIA V5: Intro to Modeling class. Or, stay tuned for a future CATIA Tip in a Minute or Less!
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