Clockmender/Precision-Drawing-Tools

Create an automated way to replace the default cube with an empty mesh and switch to edit mode

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ermo commented

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Blender starts out with a cube. For CAD purposes, the time-honoured approach is to start with an empty sketch.

Describe the solution you'd like
Have a button that checks if the current scene contains a single 2m^3 cube object, and if so, deletes said object, inserts a new empty mesh, switches to EDIT mode and hides the cursor.

It could be connected to a button that considers the currently selected view (front/top/right) in the PDT Design widget. This suggests that the button should also be available int he PDT Design widget?

Describe alternatives you've considered
Bonus points for creating a tri-plane, interactive widget showing the main editing planes (top/front/right) for the user to click on (which is then baked into the mesh-object-name in the scene) and also changes the currently active PDT Design Plane property.

Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

I have started some development work for our release 1.2.x The code basically will strip out any mesh items in the blend file, or active collection, not sure which yet... Then it will set the view axis to Top, then it will add a new single vertex object at the locations defined in the PDT Design panel for X, Y & Z coords, this is opened in Edit mode. This will form the Setup option for PDT 2D Draw. This object will have a Wireframe Modifier added with all the required settings made.

Users will then be able to add faces, using PDT Design, or PDT Command Line options. These faces will then show as outlines only, thus producing a 2D drawing, which can then be dimensioned. The User will also be able to add a 3D mesh to represent an Isometric, Oblique, or other such 3D representation of the model as per the example below:

Screen Shot 2019-10-30 at 10 22 31

Other projections will be possible, but as these are skewed from the 3D model, I think we will have to work on a routine to automatically produce these from the 3D mesh, here are some example projections:

Graphical_projection_comparison

Further design work on this is necessary to get to a conclusion for systems analysis.