I ran into a SpaceClaim 2021 R1 issue on some legacy/imported parts where circular drawing behaviour was wrong even though the 3D model looked fine. In my case, diameter/radius dimensioning and centreline behaviour were affected.
Ansys already documents the underlying condition here:
https://innovationspace.ansys.com/knowledge/forums/topic/faq-discovery-spaceclaim-unable-to-create-diameter-radius-dimensions-only-linear-dimensions-appear/
Their explanation is that the 3D geometry is not correctly aligned with the default drawing views / World coordinate planes, and their workaround is to manually orient the component or solid body using the Move tool.
What surprised me was how small the error could be. One problem part I tested was only about 0.001688104 degrees away from World Z. That is effectively impossible to spot visually, but correcting the orientation restored the drawing behaviour.
I put together the following SpaceClaim 2021 R1 / SpaceClaim.Api.V19 IronPython script to automate the diagnosis, correction and verification.
The basic workflow is:
- Select one planar datum face that should be square to a World axis.
- Run the script.
- It determines the nearest World X, Y or Z axis and measures the angular error.
- If the part is already aligned, nothing is changed.
- If a small error is detected, it automatically applies the required World-axis rotations.
- It reacquires the face geometry after each move and checks that the actual result matches the calculated result.
- It performs a final verification and never saves the document automatically.
A couple of notes from developing/testing it:
The important part in SpaceClaim 2021 R1 was reacquiring the face geometry after each Move.Rotate operation. Retaining the pre-move Geometry.Direction object could make an immediate verification read stale even though the move itself had physically worked.
The script also has a deliberately conservative automatic correction limit of 0.05 degrees. That is just a safety guard to prevent the tool automatically straightening deliberately angled geometry or a badly chosen datum face.
Tested environment:
- Ansys SpaceClaim 2021 R1
- SpaceClaim 2021.1.0.11221
- SpaceClaim.Api.V19
I have not tested or qualified this against later SpaceClaim / Discovery API versions, so I would not assume compatibility without checking.
This is intended for small accidental orientation errors on legacy/imported parts. The selected planar face must genuinely be intended to align with its nearest World axis.
The script never auto-saves, refuses ambiguous multiple component occurrences, and stops rather than automatically retrying if verification fails.
Sharing it because this particular problem can be surprisingly difficult to diagnose when the misalignment is only a few thousandths of a degree.
If anyone tests it on another SpaceClaim build/API version, feedback on the exact version and result would be useful.
