Rotate Assemblies 360 Degrees — Cabinet Design Software Video

Rotate assemblies any amount to fit cabinets into corners.

We’ve been working on our cabinet design software to enable you to rotate assemblies  (actually any container) to any degree (no less than one degree increments) in any direction. This gives you the ability to put together complex objects like a door – with many attributes such as holes, joinery, contouring, or shaping – and take that door and slant it in  any direction any distance.

There are some limitations at this time.  For the present we cannot rotate an individual board.  For that you must use the slant function.  As you may know the slant function has the limitations of not being able to slant the board with attributes. We are working on the ability to rotate a board but that will not become available until version 5.  It turns out to be a very complex process.  In the meantime there is a perfectly acceptable workaround.  I show the way I approach this task in the attached video.

Basically I insert another assembly into my primary assembly and put the board I want to rotate into that “sub assembly”.  After rotating and positioning the board as I want it, I can choose to leave it as a “sub-assembly”, or do a “merge assemblies” bringing the board directly into that assembly. There are pros and cons of either approach.

The arguments for merging the assemblies are simplicity and the ability to create a single shop drawing for the assembly. I suspect the shop drawing is the more significant of the reasons to do it this way.

The argument for keeping the assemblies separate is that you have the ability than to move that door around as necessary.

In terms of moving objects around after they’ve  been rotated you  need to take care of the distances and locations.  Mark the point of origin (check box in spreadsheet)  before you rotate a door so you can be certain that you are providing the values of left, bottom, front for the point of origin and not another corner.  It’s easy to mistake which corner is indeed the point of origin when dealing with a rotated object. You need to pay attention to this.

As you rotate objects from time to time you get the message that that object doesn’t fit into the – for example – assembly, when by all appearances and indeed does look like it fits in that assembly. More than likely what’s happened is the rotating has caused one of the corners of the object to go outside of the boundaries of the containing object. Easier to say the corner of the doors sticking out of the edge of the assembly that contains a door.  So you need to move the door to a place where rotating it will not cause a corner to go outside of the boundary. This is a case where you need to color between the lines.

Video Rotate Assemblies

This is a very powerful capability within SketchList 3D cabinet making software.  It will save great amounts of time in designing pieces to put into corners.  As a brand-new, and very complex function in SketchList 3D, it will take some time for you to learn to use it to your full advantage.  Over time I suspect we will be adding tools to help you use the rotate function.

As always if you have questions or suggestions about this or any SketchList 3D capability, contact me directly.