Measuring Angle Between 2 Planes

[[Jo...]]

I have a surface I'm trying to measure to see the deviation from CAD. I used the touch probe to create plane on the surface and then created one on the CAD part, these planes are parallel to each other with some. Is there a way for me to determine the angle of the plane I measured with the touch probe offset to the CAD model and its plane?

 

[[Ti...]]

josh,

You will somehow need to align the CAD and probed part in my opinion. You need to somehow make the CAD blend into the real part as best as possible or sometimes using features as datums to do geometric alignments. A prealignment, best fit alignment may cause a CAD plane to actual plane to be only 1 deg off, whereas the functionality of a ASME/ISO style datum feature alignment could cause the CAD plane to actual plane to be off by 3 deg or perhaps only 0.5 deg.

Forgetting all the above, here is an idea....

 

The quick and dirty method would be to do this:

Construct > Plane > Auto Plane > Ctrl right click the plane CAD surface

Right Click the Plane Label > measuring principle > fitting element....choose guassian 3 sigma for this example

Coinstruct Angle > 2 direction Angle > use the dropdown to click the blue nominal plane and the second dropdown to click the green actual plane.

This method is not how to do proper parametric measurements in my opinion, you don't want to see blue and green features in the same pop up window for parametric modeling that can be repeated.  To do that see below......

 

Here is a repeatable parametric approach:

Construct > Plane > Auto Plane > Ctrl right click the plane CAD surface

Right Click the Plane Label > measuring principle > fitting element....choose guassian 3 sigma for this example

Now you should have a real plane that is obviously a little off from nominal, but we need to measure and actual plane to an actual plane....the problem is you only have a nominal plane and actual plane.

So what you do is make the nominal plane an actual plane by doing this:

Construct > Plane > Auto Plane > Ctrl right click the plane CAD surface

Right Click the Plane Label > measuring principle > copy as actual element.

Now you have copied the CAD plane into an 'actual plane' that you can now measure the real surface plane to.

 

I use a CT scanner to get meshes so maybe what you are doing is a little different. This is how I would measure a plane to itself.