I'm pretty new to NX journaling (and NX in general), but hopefully there is a simple way to accomplish what I'm doing. I've been building a journal that will create a bunch of planes (based on user input) and create intersection curves along a body.
My issue is that I'm trying to adopt this to an axisymmetric shape. If you picture a cylinder, ideally I would like to select the outer surface(s), select the outside curve(s) that make up the circumference, and tell it I want 10 planes around the circumference. This would then make 10 planes and 10 intersection lines down the length of the cylinder. I have all of this working, except that each plane is creating 2 intersection curves: one where I want it, and one "duplicate" on the opposite side of the cylinder (because the planes expand infinitely).
If I were doing this manually, obviously I wouldn't select the surfaces on the opposite side, but I was striving for an automated solution that does it all in one step. Is there anyway to limit the plane intersections such that it would only create one intersection curve? Or, assuming my origin is in the center, is there some property I can check to determine which intersection is which and delete the one I don't want?
re: intersection curves
Are you creating associative or unassociative intersection curves? Also, what version of NX?
If you are creating unassociative intersection curves, you can simply delete the one(s) that you do not want. If the curves are associative, they cannot be deleted without deleting the feature but you can hide them and/or move them to an unused layer.
You should be able to orient the WCS to your part, perhaps with the Z axis along the axis of your part, this way you will be able to differentiate the resulting curves based on the coordinates of their end points. You could check to see which quadrant the resulting curve is in and delete or hide it as necessary. The end points will be reported in ABS coordinates, there are functions in the API to convert these to the work coordinate system (WCS). Functions to convert between ABS and WCS can be found here:
http://nxjournaling.com/comment/261#comment-261
Yes thank you!!
Yes thank you!!
I had been using associative curves, but I didn't realize that was causing them to all be the same curve. After changing that to unassociative, and making the respective changes for the rest of my code to continue working, it was rather simple to do the rest.
As you suggested, I am assigning each curve and datum plane a quadrant based on WCS (thank you also for the ABS to WCS links). If the quadrants do not match, the curve gets deleted.
Thanks again! Works perfectly now!
P.S. I'm using NX 8.