Hello,

Does anyone know a way to get Solidworks to tell you the +normal direction (i.e. the "positive" side or "sense") of a surface body?

Many aspects of surface modeling implicitly rely on this normal direction of a surface body. For example:
- if you thicken, the default direction is +
- if you cut with surface, the default cut direction is to remove material from the negative side
- if you move or offset a face, the default offset direction is +
- if you sketch on a planar face, the orientation of the sketch x and y directions are based on it

Normally this doesn't matter that much, as you can just flip the direction visually to get the desired effect. But it can cause trouble if you are editing a model. For example, if you make changes to a surface body that flips its direction (say by doing replace entity in a sketch where you inadvertently replaced a sketch entity going from left-to-right with one going right-to-left, then you can expect a lot of errors downstream. You can either brute force it by fixing all the directions and reattaching dangling coincident relations to vertices, or you can just realize the issue at the source, and make your modified surface match the original orientation.

Surely there is some way to get quickly this info from the software?

Work-arounds I've discovered:
1. If you have simulation, you can view surface bodies with the shell manager, and it shows the positive direction as orange (for some reason simulation calls this direction the "bottom").
2. You can just experiment by thickening, moving, or offsetting and noting the default direction. Of these, a temporary move-face is likely the best approach, as it doesn't introduce any new topology into the model that might cause something else to get thrown off by your experiment (oh, the dreaded observer effect of quantum mechanics).
3. You can actually thicken to solid (which appears to convert everything to have + going to the outside of the solid body), and then delete all the new faces added by the thicken command.
4. You can open the file in some 3rd party program. For example, here is a screen capture from Ansys Spaceclaim where I used the Measure > Normal tool to show the normal direction of a simple imported model. I believe many other tools can extract this info as well.

Surely there's a native way in SW, and I've just missed it. Any ideas?