Inventor - New Sketch Look At Behavior

When a new sketch is created on a face of an existing part, the program will align the selected face normal to the view.  This is the default behavior applied when the program is installed.  This rotation may be prevent by removing the check mark from the following setting on the Sketch tab in the Application Options dialog box.

Assuming this setting is checked, there is another setting that will limit the rotation of the existing model view required to place the selected face normal to the view.  When Inventor is installed, the following setting, located on the Display tab of the Application Options, is set.  This setting will rotate the view by enough rotation, not only to make the view normal to the sketch plane but will also align the horizontal and vertical axis of the current plane.



 

Below is a short video showing this rotation.  Note the amount of rotation required to align the dark horizontal axis with the view.

 



 

Many users prefer this action because it is easier to predict the application of horizontal and vertical sketch constraints. 

 

Some users do not like the amount of view rotation and prefer to set the Look At Behavior to "Preform Minimum Rotation".

 

 

This setting will only rotate the view enough to align the sketch plane normal to the view and align the sketch axis with the view.  This minimum rotation may or may not align the dark horizontal axis to a true horizontal position.  Watch the video below and note the rotation is much less but that the dark horizontal axis ends up in a vertical orientation.

 





 

With this setting the user must pay attention to the axis orientation to make sure they use the correct sketch constraint when applying horizontal and vertical constraints.  If the user has configured Inventor not to show sketch axis, it is recommended that the Look At Behavior be set to "Align with Local Coordinate System" since it would be difficult to detect if the horizontal axis of the sketch actually ends up in a vertical position.