Plugin measuring Arc or curve line length

[sawhack]

Hi Guys,

I was asked to measure the length of the pipe needed on a curved facade design is there a chance i can measure the length of the curve pipe? I created the pipe using a follow me tool on facade.

Best,

Saw

[gilles]

Select the path you use to FollowMe then read the length in Entity info.

[Box]

If you have already deleted the path or you want the length of something a bit more complex, such as the length of guttering needed to go all the way around a house made up of various groups. You can use a simple trick, place a plane through the relevant groups ie: a horizontal slice through the house, then with the plane selected choose intersect faces with model. Then select the parts of the line that you need and it will all be calculated in the entity info window.
You can use section planes for this as well.

Edit: a simple sketch

---

[mitcorb]

You already know this, but:
The shortest distance will not be the true length. If your path is represented by a segmented polyline, or other kind of curve, there will be a margin of error depending on the length of the segments, which means the more segments, the smaller the margin.

[TIG]

If you Select a single Arc then the 'Entity Info' report is its 'true length'.
If you Explode an Arc into separate Edges, or if you have a welded 'Curve', then 'Entity Info' reports the total length of all of the individual 'Segments'.
So an Arc and an Exploded Arc will report slightly different lengths - the exploded version is always going to be somewhat shorter because each segment will 'cut a corner', whereas a true-arc has a summation of a 'infinity' of 'tiny-tiny' edges [2Pir*included_angle/360] - the effect of Pi is to give a result that can be refined more and more, but never quite gets to an unchanging value, as it can always be improved upon - of course in practice these tiny fractions of an inch are unimportant and so we 'round-up'... Depending on the accuracy of what you want to measure/buy/cut etc the 'segment summation' will probably do, because only a few mm are involved in quite large objects between true arc-lengths and summed segment-lengths...