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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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Why be Flexible?
March 19, 2008, 11:10 PM Garin Gardiner
As many of you have probably already discovered, when you insert or create an assembly inside of another assembly (sub-assembly) it is looked at as a rigid body. An example of this would be to insert a shock assembly into an RC car and want it to be able to compress. There is an easy way to do this by making it flexible. You might wonder why this isn't the default behavior when you first insert an assembly into another assembly. The key reason for this is performance - if every sub-assembly were to be flexible it would require your computer to work very hard to solve almost every constraint in you assembly. For this reason we allow you to simply turn the flexible behavior on as necessary.
First let’s take a look at the shock we want to be flexible so it can be compressed differently in each instance in an assembly.
Now let’s insert this into the RC Car and specify that it will be a flexible assembly. Once you have constrained it into place right click on the assembly (either in the browser or model window) and select flexible. That’s it! As long as the assembly has free degrees of freedom, you will be able to adjust the sub-assembly as necessary.
You can take this one step farther by creating positional representations to save the positional states. Perhaps in the future I will create a post or podcast showing what you can do with positional representations.
Enjoy!
3 Comments | Add Comment In the Machine > Autodesk Inventor, Tips
Comments
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March 23, 2008 05:29 AM paul van Ruth
Yes, flexible is a nice feature. However if an assy becomes flexible it will want to be checked-out every time it's being moved. This is a pain. It is also nice that you show the example with a spring involved. To make the spring change in length we would need flexible parts, which is a long standing wish! Think about that. Thanks, Paul
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March 24, 2008 01:54 PM Garin Gardiner
These are all great points and things we are aware of. I for one would love to have flexible parts.
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May 16, 2008 08:27 AM nikky gannon
I hope you take that step soon because that is the point I am at.
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