Selecting Parts Located Behind Other Parts 1

[on4now4]

I am working on some simulation and with all my past experience I never really needed constraints and things so this is the first time I have run into this.

For explanation sake lets just say you have two square blocks that are exactly the same size. Now those blocks are sitting one right on top of the other and you want to constrain the touching faces to each other. Is there an easy way to do this?

I know that you can press the up or down arrow keys and these will give you a list of all the parts behind your courser. The issue with this is that in some of the connections menus the arrow keys want to interact with the menu and first you have to right click on the part and go to "other selection" then close that window and then use the arrow key method to get it off the menu.

I know of course one could also just hide one part select one face then show and hide the other part.

Both of these methods work but get really old really quick when you are doing a large assembly. There must be a better way to do this?

 

[DBezaire]

The keyboard up/down arrows while your cursor is over the duplicate faces.


Win XP64
R20/21, 3DVIA Composer 2012, ST R20
Dell T7400 16GB Ram
Quadro FX 4800 - 1.5GB

 

[jackk]

You've already listed two of my favorite methods; 1. I usually hide the part that I don't want to constrain, and 2. occassionally I will use the Pre-Selection Navigator (Up and Down arrows).

Two other ways:

3. Use the compass to temporarily move one or both of the parts, so they are not on top of each other. [this is what I would do in the case of two similar blocks touching each other]

4. Publish the constraining features ahead of time (use short, descriptive names) while you have the part open in it's own window, and then create the assembly constraints by selecting the published features from the tree. This method provides an added benefit of automatically updating the constraints when the part is replaced with another part (as long as the published features have the same names)

 

[DBezaire]

I did not read the whole question before answering. I feel shame. Go with Jack's # 4 option



Win XP64
R20/21, 3DVIA Composer 2012, ST R20
Dell T7400 16GB Ram
Quadro FX 4800 - 1.5GB

 

[on4now4]

Thanks Jackk! I really like the #4 option. They all have uses in varying situations. I will give that a try.