Enhancements to Parting Line tool

The Evaluate > Parting Line tool has undergone some important improvements in this release. Below is the new control window followed by a list of the changes.

You now have the ability to evaluate in-draft and out-of-draft regions along both directions of the pull vector. This is useful since a mold often separates in both directions. In the control window, you can specify both a Positive Draft Angle and a Negative Draft Angle (or turn on Link Values so that the positive and negative values mirror each other).
Vector Options let you specify the pull vector direction. The options are similar to other modeling tools, including X, Y, Z, View, Picked, and Manip options. The latter is automatically selected when using the manipulator. The default direction is along the Z axis (as before). The Direction Type, Pull Direction, and Vector/Plane fields have been removed.
When Create Curves is turned on, checking on the Parting Line (0 degree) option displays the zero-degree line (where the mold separates) in addition to the positive and/or negative draft lines.
Shade Surfaces is a new option that lets you shade the regions with different colors, just as with Draft Angle diagnostic shading.
When Shade Surfaces is on, Tolerance Zone sliders are enabled below the positive and negative Draft Angle values to specify positive and negative angle tolerance zones between the in-draft and out-of-draft regions. Up to five colors can be used to show the different regions, as shown below.
The old Tolerance slider has been renamed Display Tolerance and only becomes available when Visual is checked on, to emphasize the fact that it applies to the display of visual curves only.

Selection workflow

Surfaces can now be selected, box-selected or de-selected (by clicking on them a second time) after entering the Parting Line tool.

The box selection obeys the mouse button settings in Preferences > Selection Options. However, box selection cannot be used to select meshes, or input vectors. Those still require single mouse clicks.

Note When box selecting, be careful not to mouse down on a mesh, vector or surface, as the tool does single picking on mouse down.

Changes to Draft Angle diagnostic shading

The Draft Angle diagnostic shading options in the Control Panel now include additional fields for a negative draft angle and negative tolerance zone angle when Negative Draft is checked on.

Performance enhancement

If Construction History Updates During Transforms is turned on (in Preferences > Performance Options...) curves-on-surface created by the Parting Line tool temporarily become visual curves during the interactive updates, in order to provide faster redraw. This does not happen if the curves-on-surface have locators on them, are used in trimming, or if the transformation requires the tessellation to be recomputed (for example, in Transform CV).

NoteThis also applies to curves-on-surface created with the Iso Angle and Highlights tools.