Ellipsis

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  Ellipsis is the official blog of Autodesk's Technical Evangelist Team. We will discuss all things design and manufacturing related with a focus on industries such as automotive and transportation, consumer products, industrial machinery and building product manufacturing and fabrication. We also have resident experts who will blog about specific product developments in CAD, Simulation, Industrial Design and Data Management.

  We look forward to providing you, our user community, with the most relevant and up to date developments in our industry, and hopefully with information that will assist you in doing your job better, faster, and more precisely.

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  Visibility...
  October 29, 2008 02:24 PMby Jay Tedeschi

  While working on this headset assembly last week it occurred to me that a good tip for working with derived parts was staring me in the face. I have a lofted surface that is used to shape the electronics package housing in this assembly. Not wanting to go through the motions of creating a surface like this again for the outer headset housing, it is far easier to use derive to do an associative copy of the face and then offset it for the material thickness of that part.

  

  So, the first thing I need to do is to mark the lofted surface as an exported object. Easy enough… I find the lofted surface in the browser and then from the right click menu I select “Export Object”. I save and am done with this file.

  Now, I start a new part, exit Sketch 1 and then select Derive from the palette.

  

  What’s going on? There are no surfaces to select, even though I clearly marked the lofted surface for export. Well, I actually missed a pretty important step back in the original part. I need to make the surface visible, as well as marking it as an exported object.

  

  So… back to the original part, I find the lofted surface in the browser and from the right click menu I select “Visibility”. Save and close the part, start a new one again, only this time when I run the derive command I see that the Lofted Surface is now selectable from the derive menu.

  

  What would seem to be a minor detail can actually cause you much angst if you are not mindful… so please… be careful out there!

  0 Comment | Add CommentIn Ellipsis > Tips, Industry News, Inventor 2009, Inventor 2008

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  Rule Fillet
  October 20, 2008 12:06 PMby Jay Tedeschi

  Well, as promised I will take a look at yet another unique area of functionality available to users of the Plastic Features Technology Preview. Today I will introduce you to the Rule Fillet.

  

  Rule Fillet… intriguing name isn’t it? For those of you who have backgrounds in surface modeling, this name may bring to mind something like this… S(t, u) = p(t) + ur(t), an algebraic description of a type of developable surface. However, in this case, Rule Fillet is exactly what it sounds like. Quite simply, it is a fillet which has as a characteristic a set of rules governing its behavior.

  Take a look at the image below… I have applied a Rule Fillet to a Rib feature. In the dialog box you can see that I have selected the entire feature as the source and have selected all of the edges of this feature as targets for the fillet.

  

  I do not however want the top or end faces of the rib feature to have filleted or rounded edges, so I must exclude them from the selection set. If I expand the dialog box to show additional settings, I have access to tools which will allow me to remove both individual faces and edges from the selection set.

  

  The advantage of setting up a fillet rule such as this is that if there are any geometric changes to the feature, e.g., rib elements being added or removed from the feature definition, the fillet will automatically be added or removed as well, without any additional interaction on the part of the designer whatsoever.

  

  A quick edit to the Rib feature, selecting an additional sketched line which was omitted previously updates the Rib network. Fortunately, because of the Rule Fillet, I do not have to restructure the part history, or edit the fillet to include additional edges as the new addition is included in the existing Rib feature and therefore is filleted automatically.

  

  A catchphrase in the software industry for years has been the ability to “capture design intelligence”. It could be argued that features such as Rule Fillet finally achieve this.

  0 Comment | Add CommentIn Ellipsis > Tips, Inventor 2009, Industry News

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  Getting Thin...
  October 12, 2008 01:44 PMby Jay Tedeschi

  Well, I’m back after a two week swing through Canada where I helped to deliver the Digital Prototyping message to audiences of Inventor users as well as users of our competing products. After presenting 6 times, in 6 different cites there was one dominant theme… the next generation of tools that Inventor users will have at their disposal are available right now on \\Labs. The new Autodesk Inventor Plastic Features Technology Preview is fundamentally different with respect to basic modeling tasks, different enough that it deserves some serious column time in the coming weeks.

  Today I am going to look at what will most likely be the first departure from the typical modeling methodology that you will encounter when using PFTP… hey, I know, not the best acronym ever, but it is significantly easier to enter on the keyboard. Anyway, consider the simple extrude command…

  

  Not quite as simple as it once was when I have additional things to consider with regard to wall thickness. For those of you who do a lot of plastic parts however, THIS is the ideal workflow as the part essentially understands that it is a thin walled part.

  In creating this electronics housing I will first need to cap the open top and bottom you see in the image above. In selecting the new “Thin” tab I have access to controls for plastic feature specific characteristics. With this part, I want to close the top and bottom and open the ends.

  

  If you look at the image above you can see that I first deselect the “Open Faces” From and To terminations. Next up I have to now select the faces, or more specifically an edge of the faces that I want to open.

  

  In selecting the “From Profile” option I can now open up the faces that you see in the image above. Ahhh, sweet success… the “finished” start of my electronics housing package.

  

  Next in this series I will look a bit more in depth at additional functionality of the PFTP. Hope you tune in to check it out.

  0 Comment | Add CommentIn Ellipsis > Inventor 2009, Tips, Industry News