Cabinet Software – Locating Rotated Containers

Rotating in Cabinet Design Software

The last release of SketchList 3D cabinet building software included the ability to rotate containers (assemblies, drawers, doors, and hardware) by any amount of degrees.  This will let you take fully developed objects – say a shaped board – and rotate or slant it as your design requires.   In the SketchList 3D cabinet software this introduces a bit of a challenge.  This is because rotating actually moves the point of origin of a container.  This puts you in the position of needing to guess or use trial and error to precisely locate the container. Of course when using cabinet software you want as much to be specific and entered or calculated as possible. To make this happen in a rotated container we’ve added another location functionality to SketchList 3D.  The video in this post shows how to do that.

Basically we find the left bottom front of value for every corner in a container. You can see these corners if you right-click the button at the upper left-hand corner of the image area and so select show corners from the menu selection. When you do that you’ll see that each corner has a blue sphere connected to it. If you right-click on that blue dot of form will open where you can enter the desired value for left, bottom, front. Clicking okay then moves the container.

This is a very nice way to move containers around in your project.  Using this technique of specifying the location of a given corner you can quickly and accurately locate any corner of the two or three dimensional container in three-dimensional space.  This means if I want the top right corner of a container to be 14 inches from the bottom and 60 inches from the left boundaries of the project I just enter 14 and 60 and the container is located.  I think you’ll find this a bit quicker then using the triplets in the form or perhaps even the spreadsheet.