Tutorial - Rendering a point

Let’s learn by example.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to render a point using the qsketchmetric.renderer.Renderer module.

We’ll assume you have QSketchMetric installed already as well as QCAD Professional and have already done the rendering tutorial as well as parametrization tutorial

First download the tutorial.dxf file from the QSketchMetric repository. It is an example of a parametric DXF file that we will use in a tutorial.

To do so, open it and click Ctrl+S to save it to your computer. As a convention, we’ll assume you saved it in a file called tutorial.dxf.

Open tutorial.dxf in QCAD Professional, the result should look like this:

tutorial.dxf opened in QCAD Professional

Rendering a point is dead simple with QSketchMetric. All you need to do is to create a POINT entity on the VIRTUAL_LAYER. (Draw -> Point -> Single Point) The ``POINT`` must be connected to the other entities!

Next you need to add a parameter to the point. To do so select the point and scroll down the Property Editor to the Custom section. Click on the red plus button and add the parameter.

Name should be: name.

Value should be: variable_name you desire.

variable_name will be returned by the renderer with new rendered coordination of the point.

Added point should look like this:

That is all! Now you can save the file and render it with qsketchmetric.renderer.Renderer.render() method:

from qsketchmetric.renderer import Renderer
from ezdxf import new
from ezdxf import units

output_dxf = new()
output_dxf.units = units.MM
variables = {'h': 50}
renderer = Renderer('tutorial.dxf', output_dxf, variables)
variables = renderer.render()
print(variables)

output_dxf.saveas('rendered_tutorial.dxf')

tutorial.dxf will be rendered on to the output_dxf ezdxf.document.Drawing and rendered variable from the VIRTUAL_LAYER will be contained in the variables dictionary with the following content:

{
    "foot_point": (20, 10)
}

(20, 10) is the rendered coordinate of the point.

Congratulation you renderer your first point using :meth:`qsketchmetric.renderer.Renderer.render` method!