Re-sizing cabinet designs

Re-sizing cabinet designs – one size can indeed fit all.

In this week’s webinar we had an opportunity to discuss and use the cabinet re-sizing capability within sketch list 3-D. The users had questions about what would happen to a shape or to a data placed on a board when that board was stretched or shrunk in a cabinet resize.   We experimented back and forth re-sizing cabinet designs.   I’d say that people were very impressed with the power of SketchList to resize all of a cabinet and even selected parts of different cabinets. One person said that it was an extremely powerful capability and would enable him to design a very small number of cabinets and just pull those in as standards and resize them as needed in his job.

Re-sizing cabinet designs is one of those features that is extremely powerful, very useful, and all in all very easy to use. It is also, unfortunately, one of those features that probably a lot of users both old and new just don’t fully appreciate.  So as I often do I thought I would put together a quick video and posted to YouTube to further explore this powerful capability.

The re-sizing can be accomplished using the red dots. If you’ve seen the red dot video you know that you right-click a red dot and can type in a new value for the location of that edge or size of the assembly and SketchList 3-D resizes automatically. That is the default way of using the re-sizing feature.  It has the advantage of being easy to use and very fast. In order to keep things from becoming more complicated the necessary SketchList assumes that the place where the re-sizing will occur (re-sizing plane or “pink box”) is at the center of the assembly. This means that any boards that fall across the center of the assembly will be stretched from that point. Most of the time this works.  It doesn’t work if by chance that center re-size plane falls on something like a toe kick, a drawer, or a shape that you do not want to resize.  For that reason we’ve implemented the ability to move the re-size plane (which appears in your assembly as a pink plane or box when you right-click the red dot).

You can be very selective about exactly where you position the re-size plane.  Anything touched by the plane has its size changed according to the amount you drag the red dot. Any objects between the plane and the direction your dragging the red dot will be moved.

This is one of those things that is much easier to understand when you see it.   So here’s a video click on it and think about how you might be able to use this capability to speed your work when re-sizing cabinet designs.