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.

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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).

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 I spent most of this morning playing around with the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly with nothing to show for my time –so-far.

Early this morning I downloaded and installed the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly from the Autodesk Labs website. The program is very small, and the download and install were quick and painless.

I had seen a video by Donnie Gladfelter over at thecadgeek yesterday, and decided to re-watch it as a primer before delving into the program myself…

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(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.”

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Most of the things that remain to be modeled to complete this project have been covered earlier, and are relatively easy – the four knobs on the front are the last challenge.

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I’ll run through some of the procedures that weren’t covered earlier and get the rest of the stuff modeled in this post. If there is time, I’ll move right into the knobs to finish this up, otherwise, there’ll be one more post in this series.

On the side of the unit, there is some sort of hatch that will be represented in this model as a shallow groove in the surface, and a tapped drain hole –both of which are procedures covered earlier in this series, but there are differences that should be shown. To begin, I created a plane on the furthest right horizontal edge of the model (could also have been completely off the model).   Read the rest of this entry →

I’ll begin this post by going all the way back to the first extrusion in this model to fix an error I made way back then. It will go a long way to demonstrate the power of parametric modeling.

The problem was that during the first extrusion, I inadvertently included the profile of the front reinforcing ribs in the selection set, giving the entire lower front an angle that it should not have. To fix this mistake, all I did was double click on the offending extrusion, get the profile selector from the dialog, hold down the shift button on my keyboard, and select the profile I want to remove from the selection set…

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