Property Grid

Name

Name of the work surface.

Description

Description of the work surface.

Function

Function of the work surface.

Purpose

Purpose of the work surface.

Location Type:

Indicates how the work surface was defined, it is one of:

• Principal Plane: Axis parallel work surface defined from grid plane with or without offset, or explicit coordinate.

• Inclined (3 Points): A work surface defined by 3 points.

• Inclined (Angled): A work surface defined from axis-parallel plane and 2 angles or from another model.

The location type cannot be changed.

Location:

The location entry is normally expandable, and the look of the substructure depends on the location type.

• Principal plane: The grid plane reference and the offset can be updated or the axis + coordinate.

  

  or

  

• Inclined (Angled): The coordinates of Center and Normal can be updated.

  

• Inclined (3 Points): The coordinates of the three points can be updated.

  

Older work surfaces (created in E3D 4.1) cannot be modified and are displayed as:

Depth in Front:

The depth on the positive side of the plane.

Depth Behind:

The depth on the negative side of the plane.

Note:
Changing the depth will update the box. however, changing the box will not update the depth. This makes it possible to have one depth (often rather narrow) for symbolic representation, but a larger work surface volume to be used looking for up surrounding models.

Box:

Defines the volume of the work surface.

These are the values shown if you query the WVOL attribute. It is also this box that is used to look up models within the work surface.

For an axis-parallel work surface, this represents the clip box created by the “Create Clip Box” function. For an inclined work surface, the box values will have impact on the inclined box, they can be used to narrow down the default box. The combination of the default inclined clip box with the axis parallel box will give a result that is not obvious.

This is how it is calculated:

1. Calculate the default inclined clip box, Box 1. This is aligned with the work surface orientation.

2. Take the axis-parallel box values, Box 2. Make the minimum box of Box 2 in the work surface orientation, Box 3.

3. Box 1 and Box 3 are now both inclined with the same orientation. Calculate the intersection of Box 1 and Box 3, the result is Box 4.

4. Box 4, the grey area, is the final resulting inclined clip box.