I’m looking to draw a series of components and export a table containing the universal coordinates of points contained in each. For the following image I’d like to see:
object, corner, X, Y, Z
1, NW, 0, 12, 1
1, NE, 12, 12, 2
1, SW, 0, 0, 1
1, SE, 12, 0, 2
2, NW, 12, 13, 2.5
… etc.
The “Generate Report” function seems like the right track. I haven’t played around with it too much but between tags, instances, and definitions I think I can get the table organized correctly.
But reporting seems to only return the coordinates relative to the component axes. Is there a way to request universal coordinates?
I don’t know of a way to do that although you might give collections of points a tag specific to their identity. You should be able to include the tags in the report.
Another thought: If your points were named components, NE, SE, SW, and NW with the component’s origins on the points. Then you could run the report using the component definition name and coordinates. No need to explode anything.
It seems as though if I don’t explode the outer component, the point-components (NE, SW, etc) are reported as relative to their outer component’s origin rather than the universal origin. Maybe there’s an easy way to set all components’ origin (and rotation) to the universal coordinate system?
Outer component origins centered on the guidepoints in each component. Only the 3D Text is a component inside but those text component could be exploded. It would probably be better to replace the guidepoints with actual geometry.
The report can be rearranged as needed in your spreadsheet app. Going back to your screen shot, you might have tags 1, 2, and 3 and then the four points on panel 1 are given tag 1, the four on panel 2 are given tag 2 and so on. Then include tags as part of the report.
The points need to be in a component (or a group) and at the component’s origin to be reported. In my case I need a number sets of the four points (NW, NE, SW, SE) where their relative spacing is identical, hence my initial thought to put the four points into an outer component … but this doesn’t work since they are only reported relative to the outer component’s origin. The best process seems to be using outer components for placement/tagging, then exploding the outer components to find myself in a similar place to your example.
