SketchPlane3d.through missing

ianmackenzie / elm-geometry

2D/3D geometry package for Elm

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SketchPlane3d.through missing #105

Closed MartinSStewart closed 5 years ago

MartinSStewart commented 5 years ago

The function SketchPlane3d.through is missing. If I want to create a sketch plane from a point + direction I have to instead use Plane3d.through and then Plane3d.fromPlane.

This is a minor inconvenience but it seems odd that SketchPlane3d can't do this directly.

ianmackenzie commented 5 years ago

Seems reasonable, but raises a few questions it would be great to hear your thoughts on:

Is it sufficiently obvious in SketchPlane3d.through point direction that the given direction will be used as the normal direction of the sketch plane, instead of its X or Y direction?
Should SketchPlane3d.withNormalDirection be added too, for symmetry/consistency?
What about SketchPlane3d.throughPoints? This is an interesting one since I don't think you'd want to just make it a shortcut for calling Plane3d.throughPoints and then SketchPlane3d.fromPlane. In the sketch plane case, you could tweak the logic a bit to ensure that the X direction of the sketch plane is equal to the direction from the first point to the second and the Y direction is chosen such that the third point has a positive Y component.

MartinSStewart commented 5 years ago

I think it is obvious given that the documentation in Plane3d.through explains what it does: Construct a plane through the given point, with the given normal direction. Additionally, if someone thought the direction parameter was for it's X or Y direction, they would probably pause and wonder how you control the rotation around that axis.
SketchPlane3d.withNormalDirection already exists?
SketchPlane3d.throughPoints also already exists?

ianmackenzie commented 5 years ago

Ugh, thanks, my brain was clearly not working yesterday! You're right, especially with SketchPlane3d.withNormalDirection and SketchPlane3d.throughPoints already defined, SketchPlane3d.through does seem like an omission.

I think I'm getting pretty close to an initial release of the next major version of elm-geometry with units/coordinate systems tracking, so I might just roll this into that version.

MartinSStewart commented 5 years ago

Hehe, no worries. I look forward to the new version. 👍

ianmackenzie commented 5 years ago

As a side note, I was thinking it might also make sense to have SketchPlane3d.fromXAxis and SketchPlane3d.fromYAxis functions that arbitrarily choose a Y or X direction respectively. Useful if you want to do something like revolve a profile around an axis, so you need a sketch plane through that axis but don't really care where the revolution "starts".