HCM 2-D: General Information

Relationships can be assigned both simultaneously to the drawing process and to existing assemblies. The HCM thus combines the advantages of history-based and constraint-oriented systems.

In addition to distance, radius and angle changes, logical constraints like parallelism, perpendicular, alignment, tangent, concentricity and symmetry are available.

Automatic search algorithms allow largely independent capture of these geometric relationships, thereby enabling large drawings to be easily parameterised.

Under-defined or over-defined geometry elements are highlighted in colour, with the system's resulting degrees of freedom also being displayed.

It should be emphasized that the geometry can be manipulated with very few relationships even if the overall system is still under-defined. This provides a good deal of convenience when subsequently parameterising parts.

Dynamically dragging lines and points changes the geometry, while taking into account predefined constraints. Parameter changes to geometries and mechanisms are thereby visualised as real-time simulations. This also enables missing dimensions to be identified immediately.

HCM models can, of course, be stored as variants and re-used at any time. This enables many construction tasks to be systematically captured and automated.

If a geometry element is deleted in an HCM model, all affected HCM constraints are also deleted. This also applies to the HiCAD Chamfer/Fillet functions.

Only parts that have been drawn correctly can be handled properly. That is why, for example, the same points should also be actually identical and a line should not consist of many segments.

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