If you didn’t sleep through the previous post, you were promised some stuff at the very end. This is that stuff. It took longer than it should have as I had to get some drawings to the plumber. Without further ado…

The next part needed in this assembly is another 4” ‘Long Sweep’ elbow that goes somewhere below the circle that represents the closet flange penetration. To place this part, I needed to align the axis of one of its legs to an axis running through the center of the circle parallel to the Z Origin Axis. That axis does not exist, so I needed to create it.

.

A quick note about structure before I continue. All of the layout sketches and work features being created are located within the Plumbing Layout.ipt part file which is located within the Plumbing_08-25-10.iam. All of the plumbing parts are located in the same assembly as can be seen in the image of the Browser Bar to the above (click).

  Read the rest of this entry →

For this series of articles, the Routed System of choice will be your average everyday home plumbing. The DWV (drain, waste, and vent) system to be exact.  

The DWV layout I am using as an example is for is for a little eco cottage design that has all of the mechanicals running through chases and partition walls to keep the thermal envelope as intact as possible — but the technique will work on any design equally well. Also of note is that the design has a FPSF (frost Protected Shallow Foundation) slab……which means there is only one chance to get things right.

The Penetrations

The penetration drawing is a plan view sketch that shows where the various pipes pass through the structure at whatever level is represented. It is created  as the first sketch in a part file located in the overall plumbing assembly. This is a hold-over from ship design days, but it works on houses as well.  

For this particular house, you can see that the stack and vents run up a 2” x 6” partition wall. There is a wet vent at the other end of the wall as well, but is not shown. All of these penetrations run down the center of the wall, and can be drawn on the same plane, which is where I started.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s been a busy few days filled with computer crashes  & glitches, email interviews, and a huge amount of hectic modeling  behind-the-scenes on a big fat house model.

Thanks to help from Mark Flayler over at IMAGINiT, the big culprit behind all of the crashing I have been experiencing has been traced to the Autodesk Labs 3DA technology preview… which makes sense I guess. Technology previews are not finished work where most of the buggyness like this is ironed out  before it gets added to a program, or —-in some cases just gets discarded. Think of Labs as a place where the programmers can throw their digital spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. Sometimes you get smacked right in the face, but safe is for sissy’s

 The Make Components Crash Fix

For those of you that have installed the Inventor 3DA technology preview and are experiencing crashing upon using the Make Components command, just go to Tools>Options>Add-Ins, select Inventor 3DA from the list, then uncheck the Load On Startup and the Loaded/Unloaded checkboxes at the bottom of the dialog as shown below…

. Read the rest of this entry →

During the first attempt at testing the Photofly technology preview, I was met with a server glitch, but in the end, all went well

  I thought one of the biggest problems was with the interface itself. I’m not sure if this is present on all systems, but with dual wide screen monitors, the first of the images (Scenes?) began very far to the right of the interface as shown in the image to the right….

  And there were no scroll bars to slide things over. It wasn’t until I started writing this article that I found out that you need to drag the thumbnails using your cursor, and I would be willing to bet via touch screen as well. Cool, but unexpected.

Creating a Scene

To begin with, I took  a bunch of images of a globe (shown in the image above) at about 10° intervals while walking around the thing. I went around three times at different levels, and wound up with 54 images. I then fired up the Photo Scene Editor…

Read the rest of this entry →

(BUSINESS WIRE)–Autodesk announces the availability of Project Photofly, a technology preview of a web service that allows users to easily create 3D models from photographs using the cloud. Project Photofly is currently available for free* on Autodesk Labs.

The Autodesk Project Photofly technology preview enables architecture, design, media & entertainment and manufacturing firms to easily create 3D models from a series of photographs.

Photofly breaks the barrier to entry to image-based modeling because of its automatic calibration process. The manual calibration of photographs enabled by other technologies is complex and requires a strong expertise to get a good result. Project Photofly utilizes an automatic calibration engine, called “Camera Factory,” which is made available as a web service through a Windows-based client called “Photo Scene Editor.” Customers connect to the Camera Factory through the Photo Scene Editor, and then use their favorite Autodesk 3D modeling software (AutoCAD, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk 3ds Max, etc.) to consume the data in DWG format to model on top of the images.

“Reality capture gives designers and engineers the ability to better measure, analyze, document and plan for projects.”

Read the rest of this entry →