- Angular running dimensions are a set of dimensions
that are measured from a zero-degree dimension
and a drawing view as its orientation,
and then works out from there in the positive 360 degree.
So what do I mean by that?
Let's take this whole pattern that I have on my flange here.
It would be really nice to have
this as a zero-degree reference
and then the angular dimension out to each hole.
Now, if you're trying to do this, the brute force way,
you might draw two center lines, go into smart dimension
select the two lines and then get
your angular driven dimension between the two.
But I propose that there's a better way
using the angular running dimension tool.
So I'm going to go ahead and delete this,
and I'm also going to delete this second center line
but I'm going to leave the first one for reference
just in case, also notice that I have a point
in the middle of this circle to help as well.
So I'm going to go down to my annotations,
go to my smart dimension drop down
and here I'll find angular running dimension.
I'm going to click on that to activate it.
I'm going to start by selecting this center point rate here
and dragging it vertically
to create my zero dimension point.
Now, with the tool's still activated,
I'm going to move my mouse around
and click each circle that I want to reference.
And you can see as I do that, I get the degree position
around the drawing view.
Super handy, super quick, really easy to reference
these various positions.
And that can be really handy,
especially for somebody who's a fabricator
who wants to use an indexing tool let's say,
to go in here and create these various holes
and counterbore features.
Once you're done, you just hit the green check mark
or the escape key and all of your dimensions are there.
I will know that if you disturb this first zero dimensions
if I delete this, it does delete your reference
for all of the other dimensions and they will go away.
So you'll want to kind of hold whatever you start
as your baseline as sacred and then go from there.
So again, I'm going to click on angular running dimension,
choose my center point and drag it up vertically.
You can drag it out any way that you want.
It'll snap orthogonally, with the 45 degree
or 90 degree positions naturally.
But if you had another piece of reference geometry,
you could snap to that.
I want to just again do it vertically like we expect
and then select each reference around it.
These don't have to be circular entities as well,
they could be points, they could be lines,
they could be whatever that's referenced
around this geometry using this as the center point.
When I'm done, I just hit the green check box,
and I'm ready to go with all of my dimensions.