Quickest way to find an intersection of solids surfaces?

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Quite often I am trying to find the line that sits where the faces of two solids intersect. As indicated by my red arrow.

 

(The solids have not been added together - they are two separate solids whose volumes overlap)

 

If I want to find this line exactly (without doing a solid addition/subtraction which will make it become an edge) all my current methods are rather convoluted involving drawing intersecting 2d lines on working planes.

 

Is there some straightforward way of finding that line (or points on it) that I am missing?

 

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Here is one example of the kind of convoluted operations I end up doing, to achieve something seemingly straightforward. Hopefully the intended end result is obvious from the recording.

 

 

 

[markdd]

The Analysis tool does this in two clicks.

[Tom W.]

Do you need the 2D object to snap to?

 

 

[Tom W.]

2 minutes ago, markdd said:

The Analysis tool does this in two clicks.

 

I always thought it only worked on NURBS!

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

12 minutes ago, Tom W. said:

I always thought it only worked on NURBS!

Although the standard 3D tools retain their history (add solids, etc) the underlying code is NURBS, as I understand it.  That must be why EAP always converts the path to a NURBS path, but leaves the profile alone. 

 

The analysis tool should be renamed, it is such a great tool, but it's name is ambiguous.

 

[Tom W.]

6 minutes ago, VIRTUALENVIRONS said:

The analysis tool should be renamed, it is such a great tool, but it's name is ambiguous.

 

Or they should correct the tool descriptions:

 

 

The Help description says something completely different:

 

Actually now I think about it I have used it on 3D solids before but had forgotten, and checking the tool descriptions made me think you couldn't...

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

I had never really paid attention to this tool.  There are other ways to get the same result, so I had never paid attention to it for this purpose until @markdd posted a very good video on the use of the tool.

There are many unknowns on how to use Vectorworks NURBS.  Unfortunately the body of knowledge lies outside of Vectorworks itself, which I suppose is why there is very little on how to model cars, planes, boats, etc.

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1 hour ago, markdd said:

The Analysis tool does this in two clicks.

Aha!

 

Thanks.

 

Have never used this tool. I will now.

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1 hour ago, Tom W. said:

Do you need the 2D object to snap to?

 

 

 

 

Yes, I suppose that should have worked for me, at least for two of the extrudes.

 

Unfortunately I often find these "smart edges" and so on rather janky. VW doesn't reliably find them for me. I think it gets worse, the more complex my model gets. It is often seeing ghost objects and so on.

 

I wonder if this is another thing that is worse in perspective (which I like to work in) than it is in orthogonal like in your recording above.