Is there any way to measure geometry in CC? Yes, I can set the grid dimension and do crude measurements but that’s at best. I need to do something similar to AutoCad’s ‘dist’ comand.
Thank you.
Draw a rectangle or line or circle and check its size (after halving if need be).
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Brilliant! Thank you! So simple it’s embarrassing now I have asked, LOL
It’s the way you HAVE to do it…but in practice it’s not so easy. Mostly because circles and rectangles draw from the middle outward in both directions…so getting the bounding object to be the right size isn’t so easy. You have to draw the bound and then, unless you were really lucky, resize it to meet up with your object. And, if your object is not directly horizontal or vertical, you’re going to be shifting the starting point as well. It’s kludgy. A measure tool would be MUCH nicer 
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Building on what Gary said… maybe someone can help me understand… why, in Carbide Create do the squares measure from the center when creating them? Is this a cad legacy thing or something?
It’s not intuitive…maybe it is for others, but not for me. Every time I crate a box I have to go through the extra steps of immediately needing to resize it.
Circles make sense to draw from the center point, but not squares. Squares should be dragged from corner to corner. Just about every other drawing software that I use have boxes drawn corner to corner.
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Building on what Jon built on what I said…tools I’ve used a lot (like Photoshop and Lightburn) allow you to draw in the direction of your mouse and alternatively allow a modifier key to be pressed to draw from the center out (and other options as well…but those two would be awesome). That would give the best of all worlds…like do it the way it is by default, but if I press SHIFT and drag, it draws in the direction of the mouse movement?
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This has been raised in the Feature Requests section - hopefully it is considered for a future release.
Note that if you use horizontal/vertical lines in the new beta:
then you will see the dimension when the line is selected.
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Well…you see the size of the bounding box for the object…which is only the measurement of a perfectly vertical or horizontal object that doesn’t have turns.
This is the way Lightburn has implemented it…I think it’s rather thorough and useful:
When you select the measurement tool
and the click on an object, the tools measures a few things automatically:
It shows you the segment of the object that your mouse clicked on…
but it ALSO shows you the size of the entire object:
The “Perimeter Length” is all of the segments and curves added together for the object. Width and Height are the measurements CC shows in the info box. It also gives you a bunch of other info. Also notice that when curves are selected, the info box shows info pertinent to curves - in addition to the same overall object info:
Pretty good implementation…very easy to use. Also note that the info doesn’t change when you move your mouse away from the line segment. Until you hover over the a new line segment, the info in the box remains constant, so you can write it down, screenshot it (like I did) etc. Very well thought out.
- Gary
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And, by the way…remember that someone was asking about determining the angle between two vectors and we had a discussion of the Rube Goldberg approach to doing that (thread is here)? Notice that the Line segment Angle attribute is calculated for you right there in the box. It’s calculated from the data right above it, but it’s really nice that they do the trig for you and just present the angle.
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And another example of brilliant sketching, always inspiring!
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