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In The Machine is the official blog of the Inventor Product Management Team. It is a way for us to share Inventor news, interesting information about successful Inventor customers and partners as well as tips and tricks. From time to time we’ll also use the blog to solicit feedback from users via surveys. This blog is hosted by Garin Gardiner our Technical Marketing Manager.
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Adjust your Patterns
October 5, 2007, 08:08 PM Garin Gardiner
The other day somebody asked me why their feature pattern didnt give them the results they had expected it to. When I took a look at their part, I realized this was probably a common question for many of you that pattern things like holes on parts that dont have a constant thickness such as a plate.
Take a look at the red hole that was created with the hole features that has the termination set to "Through All".
From here we want to pattern it with the Feature Rectangular Pattern with a quantity of four and specify a spacing that looks correct.
Here is where the question typically pops up. Notice that all the holes termination looks the same as the first hole. This is actually a design of the pattern tool to improve the performance of patterns. We found that most patterns are typically on flat stock so we could assume each holes termination was the same as the original. We use this by default to speed up the pattern since we dont have to calculate the depth of each occurrence of the pattern. The good news is there is a simple option in cases like this to have the pattern adjust to the thickness of the part (large patterns will be a little slower).
In the following image notice that that I have expanded the dialog box and I can now see a few more options. In the Compute area if I select Adjust, my pattern will now update each occurrence and make each hole terminate Through All as I set in the original hole feature. Again this will be a little slower on large patterns since it has a bit more to calculate but great to have the option.
Notice with these option set we now have our holes terminating through the entire part.
I hope the next time you run accross this you will be able to easily update your pattern to give you the results you are looking for.
Garin
Comments
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October 9, 2007 09:19 AM christina nguyen
Great tip!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sweetie
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December 22, 2007 04:28 AM frederic vandenplas
If this was also available for parts in inventor assembly ! It would be a great improvement insted of the adaptivity Or is there a workaround in this case ???
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