As with the Two-Point-Center Rectangle, this new for Inventor 2013 feature has actually been around for some time as an add-in created by Brian Hall. This tool does exactly the same as the Two-Point-Center Rectangle, except for the fact that it allows you to create the rectangle at an angle in the same manner as the old Three-Point Rectangle tool.
A typical workflow goes like this…
When I installed the update this morning, something very unusual happened. Last night I created a video of a very detailed iLogic super model being run through all of its configurations. The model ran as fast as I’ve ever seen iLogic run for a model its size, but this morning, after the update was installed, every single configuration now runs a minimum of twice as fast, but mostly four of five times as fast!!!
We left off the last installment of this ERP Cabinetmaking Design Tutorial with the completion of the Rail Options. In this segment we will create a multi-value text parameter that will control how many of the intermediate rails are present. We then need to link the text value to a numerical value that is based on the current height and the amount intermediate rails desired. To start, we’ll create the multi-value text parameter. Open the Parameter Editor and create a new Text parameter named Intermediate_Rail_Count…
This new feature for Inventor 2013 has actually been around for a couple years as a free add-in created by QubeIt. The built-in one that is now available in Inventor is nice in that it has all of the rectangle commands in one drop-down list instead of the extra add-in one but, unfortunately, they only included two of the four tools that were in Brian’s add-in…
In the last installment of this ERP Cabinetmaking Tutorial we were working on the Rail Options sketch, and left off with some rail profiles attached to some geometry that was projected onto the sketch from the Side Elevation sketch. The reason for the separate sketches is pretty simple, if you start piling optional geometry atop of your base feature’s geometry, pretty soon you have a pile of unmanageable gobbledygook that is sure to explode the first time it is configured via iLogic. It’s not pretty, trust me.
As-is, the Rail Options sketch is shy 8 dimensions of a fully constrained state. All of our profiles are dimensioned for thickness with the Face_Frame_Thickness parameter, and the top and bottom rails have their widths accounted for temporarily, and all profiles are attached to the line that represents the face of the face frame via a collinear constraint…
This new feature for Inventor 2013 makes life a lot easier for those of us who create a lot of sketches. In the old days (Inventor 2011 and earlier) sketches needed to be drawn roughly to the correct size, otherwise the first dimension added to the sketch could blow the whole thing up –turning things inside-out and other undesirable behavior. In the old days, you watched the status bar, which is not very conducive to the free flow of design energies, and more recently, there is the “heads up” indicators that follow your cursor as you draw –which is actually more annoying. It’s like having a couple of flies buzzing around your cursor……flies that are always obscuring the view of your design.
The image to the right shows a freehand sketch similar to one that may be created in Inventor. It’s a quick hashing out of a shape as a designer would do as opposed to the plodding input needed to comply with the old schema. Continue reading
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