Projected Area

Pick the face and Tools>Measure should give the area and perimeter of the face

I have a macro that puts a 3D bounding box sketch around the model, but even that will not give you a projected area because nothing you mentioned defines the point of view. To get what you ask, I would say that you would have to put a plane out in the model in such a fashion that it is normal to the desired projected view. Then insert a sketch on that plane, and convert all the extremities. Then measure the bounds.

WT

I think if you look at the measure tool you can select a plane to project an area onto. Nope. SW gets it wrong. When projecting an area (face) onto a reference plane or another face the area remains constant even though project on face is selected.

This means that a sketch will have to be created on a planar face or reference plane using the converted edge of the face you wish to project and then use section properties to get the area.

In order to find a projected area, you must first define the plane on which you are making the projection. Once this is done, you can create an area that represents the projected area. One approach is to define a new sketch on the projection plane and use "convert entities" one or more times to define the boundaries of the 3-D model. Depending on the shape of your 3-D model, this may be challenging and time consuming. Once this is done, the boundaries can be used to create a planar surface or an extrusion of arbitrary thickness. Either way, the measure tool can then be used to measure the area of the resulting surface or face - this will be the projected area. Unfortunately, a complex 3-D model will make this task very time consuming and potentially impractical. If "convert entities" is not appropriate for your 3-D model, it may be necessary to define the boundaries on the projected plane by sketching the appropriate shape and using relations such as coincident and collinear to precisely match the edges of the 3-D model.

Another approach is to measure the area of the 3-D model on an arbitrary, but convenient plane (orientation) and then adjust the measured value through the use of geometry/trigonometry. For example, if you wish to know the projected area on a plane 60 degrees different from a conveniently measured plane, you can multiply the measured area by the cosine of 60 degrees (the value happens to be 0.5). The result is the desired projected area.

If you are unclear about how this works, I would suggest creating a 1x1x1 inch cube and performing some tests looking at projections on different planes. Planes at 30, 45, and 60 degrees from one face would be particularly informative.

Unfortunately, the measure tool does not seem capable of measuring a projected area, although it claims to have such an ability. All of my experiments have produced erroneous results. An enhancement request/bug fix is probably justified.

thank you for such good knowledge in this...

thank you for the good information on this topic