ST7 Sneak Peek: New Measure Tools

In an earlier blog post, I complained a little bit about some of the measurement tools in Solid Edge. ST7 to the rescue. There is a new/reworked measurement tool

With all of the tools that you can use along with it, such as the keypoints, this becomes an extremely useful and powerful, all-purpose measurement tool that no one will ever have to make any excuses for.

The interface shown above is the classic Command Bar, but it also has the vertical oriented bar with more text labels, like the rest of the interface.

The measurement labels show up right on the model, and you can get a summary dialog that shows individual and cumulative measurements when multiple items are selected. You can get surface area, perimeter, and even surface normal vector direction when a face is selected.

You can save measurements as variables. Wow, that’s nice. Using keypoint options you can select centerpoints, and it represents projected distances for all the primary axes.

You can measure angles between edges, faces, or axes, a line and a plane, or 3 points.

You can measure the volume of a solid body, or the total surface area of faces selected, and the location of the center of mass of a body.

You can measure hole details, including dia and depth, cbr/csk details, thread size and depth.

A very nice touch is the common origin measurement (sometimes called ordinate dimensions), where several items can be measured from a single origin.

This is one of those features that you’re going to have to use for yourself to really appreciate it. Remember that they are only letting me show sneak peeks of what they consider minor news about the new release. From my point of view, the items that have been allowed to escape so far have been highly productive stuff. The full list will be shown at Solid Edge University. And you want to be there.