CMMXYZ Tech Tip:
This video demonstrates a quicker way to extract the high or low point of any scan or supported feature. This new construction was introduced in PC-DMIS 2021.2.
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In this video, I wanted to talk about a brand new construction called the "constructed extreme point." This feature was introduced in version 2021.2 and was in response to a feature request in the Idea Center. If you look at these videos and some of the tutorials I've produced in the past, just a reminder that I am still an instructor at CMMXYZ and teach PC-DMIS classes all the time, remotely in our classroom or at your facility. When you get a chance, head on over to our website and go to the training section and check out all the courses that we offer.
In the past, if we wanted to extract the high point of a 3D surface, we really only had a couple of options. We could use the high point auto feature. But, that was not the easiest feature to work with, and to be honest I was not a big fan of this. It was cumbersome to set up and, you know, to arrange the boundaries and things like that.
The other option was to extract out the high point using carefully constructed variables and arrays. I actually made a video about this a while back but with the new constructed extreme point, these old methods are all but obsolete.
Let's take a look at my program here that I've written. So, I'll just zoom in a bit, and you can see it's just basically like four humps. And what I wanted to do was just extract out the high point on each of those little mounds. What I've done ahead of time was I've created four scans. These are grid scans.
Each grid scan will have a hundred points, and what I wanna do is extract out the high point in, in this case, these Z-axes. So, the way the constructed extreme point works, so let's just open that up and when you go to the method for constructed point, you can see over the years they really added to this list. There's a quite a few options here.
The last one is the newest one, the extreme point. I'll pick that. I'll pick the scan I want first, SCN-1 and up here, you can see we have a few options. We can select max or minimum and then we can select the axis direction. In my case, that's all I wanna do so I'll just select ZPLUS.
For this coordinate system, because it's kind of upside down, Z is pointing down, so I'll choose Z minimum in this case so that should extract out a point on the top here. We'll just call it point one and hit create. So, there it is there. Zoom in and take a look. You can see there so that is on the top of that little mound there. Then, I would just do the same for the rest, keeping those same settings. So, pick SCN-2, create, three, create and so forth. There we go.
Whatever you wanted to do at these points, you could those as like, you know, points for an iterative alignment, datum target points, so whatever you needed to do. The point is, it's just so easy to extract out these high points as compared to the past and I was really happy to see that they've included this in 2021.2.
Thanks for joining me, and we'll see you next time.
