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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  As Clear As Mud...
  September 24, 2008 03:10 PMby Jay Tedeschi

  I am not sure if anyone remembers or not, but one of my first posts last year was on the importance of setting the visibility environment “correctly”. For most of you I am sure wireframe display in Inventor gets used rarely if ever. There are times however when it is imperative, and quite frankly, the only way to achieve certain tasks.

  Using Shrinkwrap, available now on \\Labs is a really good example of why it is so important. Take a look at the image below…

  

  I need to select one of the faces buried in the wheel to use the “Close Face” function. Not an attractive proposition when faced with a display that looks like this. Good luck. However… make the following change to the Display Settings in Inventors Application Options…

  

  And behold the results… wireframe that you can actually use!

  

  You guys should listen to me more often… [grin]

  4 Comments | Add CommentIn Ellipsis > Inventor 2009, Inventor 2008, Tips

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  Driven Dimensions...
  September 15, 2008 08:57 AMby Jay Tedeschi

  Really busy working on AU dataset(s) this week but I did not want to neglect all of my faithful readers… [grin]. In any case, as I was using a reference dimension to drive another in an equation it occurred to me that this technique that I use so often may not be evident to all of you.

  So, that being said lets jump right into it. If you have been using Inventor for any period of time longer than a week odds are you have seen this…

  

  Any time you try to dimension part of a sketch which is already “described” via some combination of dimensions and/or constraints you will see this warning. This is not a bad thing so relax… what you end up with on your sketch will be a driven dimension, but not in the classical sense of the word. No, this is more of a reference dimension. In any case, what you end up with is a dimension whose value is enclosed in parenthesis. It will look very similar to what you see below…

  

  Now, perhaps you are not aware that you can actually use this as a reference in an equation to drive another sketch dimension or feature size/position. In this case, I wanted to add a workplane with an angular offset equal to one half of the included angle of my part. Take a look at this last image…

  

  Here I have selected one of the two workplanes on either end of my part, then a work axis which is located at the intersection of these. I am prompted for an angular offset, so I select the driven dimension added in the previous step and then divide by two… and in my case, multiply the whole thing by negative 1 to get this new plane to offset to the correct side.
  Pretty cool huh?

  4 Comments | Add CommentIn Ellipsis > Inventor 2009, Inventor 2008, Tips

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  Mass Property overrides...
  September 6, 2008 10:24 PMby Jay Tedeschi

  Here’s a solution to a problem most of you will find yourself faced with at some point when modeling purchased components. I am one of the biggest proponents of getting vendor data when at all possible, however there will be times that nothing is available and you will have to make do yourself.

  Consider the miniature speaker component pictured below… for the company which manufactures this, it is an assembly. 

  

  For you and me it should be a single component… I say “should” because there will be times that you will have to model a purchased part as an assembly, but this is only for components which have some type of mechanized movement that would be required in your design.
  So, we have established that most components of this type can be modeled as a single part from time to time when required. The problem with this approach is that unless you are VERY lucky, the mass properties of this part when you are finished will not reflect those of the purchased component.

  The very first thing you should do is to make sure that the units of measure for the documents are set to the same as the component. In most cases these days’ components such as these are catalogued with metric measurements, and if you use the standard (mm) part template the mass is set to kilograms.

  

  I personally am not particularly fond of entering mass in thousandths or less of a kilogram, so unless you are, go to the Document Settings and set the Mass Units to Grams. Now, over to the iProperties dialog.  Hopefully I am not telling you something you don’t already know, but this can be accessed either from the File pull down or by right clicking on the part icon at the top of the browser window.  Select the Physical tab...

  

  Notice that little calculator symbol next to the Mass field? Yes… that is a calculator, and it indicates that this value is calculated from the model. You need to over-ride this value with the actual value from the vendors catalog so double click to select that field and then enter the actual mass of .7 grams.

  

  The calculator symbol will change to a hand to indicate that this value has been manually entered and the mass is now set correctly. Well, that’s it for today… hope everyone has a great weekend.

  4 Comments | Add CommentIn Ellipsis > Inventor 2009, Inventor 2008, Tips