Learn/Mill/Picking & measuring
Picking geometry
At a glance
- Edge picking works exactly like Drafting—the face under your cursor decides which edge you grab
- Hover highlights the whole connected loop; hold Shift to target just the single edge under the cursor
- Shift-click touching edges and they join into one chain automatically, arcs included
- Every picker also takes flat faces and sketch curves—boundary loops resolve on their own
Every Mill operation builds its cut from geometry you pick, and picking works exactly the way it does in Drafting — the same hover, the same Shift convention, in every operation's picker. Learn it once and it's the same everywhere.
The cursor side decides
Edge picking reads the face under your cursor and grabs that face's edge: hover a hair onto a pocket floor and you get the floor loop; a hair onto the wall and you get the wall chain, switching cleanly as you move. You aim by where you point, not by clicking exactly on a line.
Hover shows the whole chain
Mousing over an edge highlights the entire connected loop it belongs to, so you see what you're about to grab before you click. Hold Shift to target just the single edge under the cursor.
Build chains edge by edge
Shift-click individual edges and touching ones join into one chain automatically — in any order, arcs included. Close the ring and it becomes a true closed loop, offset as one smooth contour with proper arcs. Four edges that form two separate runs give you two chains, each cut as its own path.
Faces and sketches too
Every picker also takes flat faces — every boundary loop resolves automatically into a contour — and sketch curves. Drill and Bore add a sketch mode that reads circles and points directly, so you can program holes from construction sketches with no modeled feature at all. Each setup lists its component's sketches in the browser with eye toggles, and sketches on planes that don't face the setup are listed muted so you know why they can't be used.