Skip to content

Measure, sections, and views

Measurement

The Measure panel reports:

  • Distance: minimum distance between two faces or edges.
  • Angle: between two faces or edges.
  • Mass properties: volume, surface area, center of mass and radii of gyration, plus the principal mass moments of inertia (kg·mm²) when the part has a material.

Pick faces or edges in the viewport to build a selection (up to two; click a selected entity again to deselect), then press Confirm. One entity reports its type and key dimension, two report distance and angle. Each result row has a trash icon.

Each body row has an axes toggle that shows a center-of-mass marker and three principal-axis arrows. Arrow length encodes how the mass is spread, so the longest arrow points along the direction the mass extends furthest. The marker follows the part's placement, and several bodies can be shown at once.

Section view

The Section panel adds an interactive clip plane in part or assembly view: a single plane with a flip toggle and a draggable offset, sourced from an origin plane, a datum plane or a planar face. It is view-only state and is not saved into the document.

Viewport display modes

  • Shaded (with edges), wireframe and transparent (X-ray).
  • Material appearance when a material is assigned.
  • Realistic rendering (cast shadows, a soft ground contact shadow, a glossy finish for un-textured bodies), toggled by the sun button in the sidebar View section.

Left-drag orbits, right-drag pans, the scroll wheel zooms toward the cursor.

Orbit and zoom both work off the point under the cursor, so put the cursor on the feature you care about before you drag or scroll. That is what lets you turn around and close in on a small part in the middle of a large assembly: rotation turns about the surface under the cursor and the wheel flies toward it, taking smaller steps as it gets closer, independent of how big the rest of the model is. Whatever is under the cursor stays under it.

You do not have to hit a small part exactly, pointing just beside it works. Over empty space, zoom falls back to the middle of the view.

The home button (bottom right) frames everything visible. To frame one part or assembly, select it and press F, or double-click its row in the model tree.

Named camera views

Save, apply, recapture, rename and delete camera viewpoints. A saved view can be selected as the camera for PNG image export.