Tag Archives: Mission

The Mission Table Model: Wrapping up the Skeletal Modeling

Posted on by

Mission table corner bracingJust the corner bracing, top, and some square pins left to model, then it’s mostly patterning from there on in … and a bit of chamfering to finish things off.

  The highlighted geometry you can see in the image to the right is the projected sketch that was used to create the corner brace. The lines seen stabbing into the aprons are representations of the screw holes that will come shortly. One of these same lines was also used to create the plane that the screw and bolt sketches were laid out on.

  The hole layout sketch is mostly constrained to projected geometry, with only the two dimensions shown below added to the equation. There are Equal constraints, Coincident constraints to projected points, along with Horizontal and Vertical constraints to create a fully constrained sketch. As per usual, here is no geometry projected from solids… Continue reading →





Mission Table: Creating the Side Apron and Bracket Extrusions

Posted on by

Today’s parts and the top are the last of the major components that need to be directly modeled. Most he rest of this piece is patterned from here…

If you’ve read the previous articles in this series, you know that whenever possible I create my new sketch planes on sketch geometry that resides on the Layout (plan view) or other skeletal geometry, and this part of the model is no exception.

The side stretcher below was, again, created from a sketch that is shared with the tenon. In the image, the tenon is shown being extruded, and if enlarged, you can see that the Extents is set to ‘To’, and a point where the front apron’s  tenon and the side apron’s tenon meet is being selected as the stopping point. Continue reading →





Mission Table Design: 3D Modeling the Double Tenoned Shelf

Posted on by

As stated in an earlier post, when modeling a multi-sold layout part, it is a best practice to reference only the skeletal geometry wherever possible.

.As you may be able to see in the image below, the yellow shelf plane was created via the line and point method at a point on the main elevation sketch that represents the top face of the shelf. The shelf boards were laid out early in the design process on the Layout sketch down at the bottom of the image. I always lay out all of the boards when designing Mission Furniture because generally the boards are book matched and often have butterfly splines between them. The boards in this case are book matched, but have no butterfly splines.  

The modeling process for the first shelf board, as shown below, is simply to create a sketch on the plane that was just created,  project the geometry that describes the board up to the sketch, and finally, extrude the shelf downwards to the point on the elevation sketch that describes the bottom of the shelf. That point on the image below is the next intersection down from the plane shown… Continue reading →





Mission Table Design: Modeling the Stretcher

Posted on by

One of the stretchers for the 3D Mission Table Model

The stretcher for the Mission Table has quite a lot going on. There are the tenons on both ends that are chamfered and pin mortised, long through slot mortises for the shelf tenons with pin mortises from below, and the 13 slat mortises.  Wow.

To begin modeling the stretcher, I needed to create Stretcher Plane 01 at the inside face of the leg that will become the shoulder of the tenon at that end. As I’ve stated before, I do not want to create a plane on the face of a solid body, so I create the plane by line and endpoint like the others as shown below. The solids are shown for reference only, their visibility was turned off before creating the plane… Continue reading →





Inventor Multi-Solid Body Skeletal Modeling Exploration Continues

Posted on by

Picture of the Autodesk Inventor Browser BarIn this, part two of this exploration into the Mission End Table Inventor multi-solid body I created about a year ago, we look at the main sketches.

 Generally I like to  start by sketching and creating parameters for as much of the design as possible before I do any modeling. This allows me to get a big picture view of the design, and also keeps the sketches grouped at the top of the feature tree so that any future maintenance  or modifications to the skeleton can be done with a quick EOP (End of Part) roll-up to a point just after the last sketch as is shown in the image to the right. If you were to model & extrude as you go, sketches would get buried, and you or whoever else comes after you would have to do a lot of digging to figure out the design intent.  The time saved by being neat will keep money in you or your company’s pocket, and save a lot of headaches down the road.

 Share Sketches When Possible

It is also good practice to share sketches on a given plane….unless it will cause overlapping of geometry which should be avoided. Overlapping geometry can force the program to try solving unnecessary  solutions, which wastes system resources, and overlapping geometry that is unrelated is just plain messy. The less features you have in the tree the better, just don’t get anal about it :) Continue reading →





Mission End Table Uses Inventor Multi-Solid Body Skeletal Modeling Techniques

Posted on by

A Stickley-like Mission End TableI was digging around in some of my models from last year, and happened upon the Mission End Table I designed as a test of multi-solid body modeling techniques…

…so I went through the model to see what I was doing back then as far as modeling techniques. It was an interesting step back in time, and I’ll share what I found over the course of several posts.

I would have liked to have been able to share the date that this model was created, but unfortunately, the switchover to Windows 7 appears to have caused some mischief with the “Created on” dates. All of the Inventor files now say they were created on the day of the Win7 install…… even though the files are stored on a separate drive! Curious, but not a big deal. I’m pretty sure this model ws created just after the release of Inventor 2010 in March (?) of 2009.

Also during my brief overview of the model, I found that there are no User Parameters whatsoever. There are Reference Parameters and quite a few parameters that were created in situ, (on the fly) —but no User Parameters. The only difference this makes is that while the in situ parameters are easier to create initially, they are harder to find later (they become scattered amongst the ‘generic’ parameters).  I may have been playing around with the new on the fly parameters feature to test its merits at the time, but these days I prefer to add all important parameters as User Parameters so they are easy to find, and generally reserve the on the fly ones for things I am unlikely to, but may change. For example, in the image below, you can see a couple lonely ‘on-the-fly’ parameters amongst the sea of generically named ones… Continue reading →