Adaptive Cables, Tubes, and Ropes in Inventor | Autodesk Virtual Academy

um today i'm joined by my good friend and colleague here cameron wetton cameron how's it going good great to be here nigel absolutely thanks for joining us cam um cam is one of the application engineers here on our team who works primarily in the post sales department um on a lot of our automation projects so i know uh cameron you're working on some pretty robust automation projects that are uh they got you locked up in your room there for the next couple of months so it's definitely good to talk to you every once in a while um and today we're going to go over uh something in inventor that i think is really important and kind of uh takes some of people's modeling to that next level right we can all you know make sketches we can all do extrudes um but oftentimes people try to stay away from things like sweeps um and adaptive features as well strictly because sometimes you get a bunch of errors um and you you know just sometimes for me especially when i started using it it was really frustrating but once you know you kind of get all of those intricacies down it makes it a lot easier and there's a lot of really useful applications for some of these more advanced modeling methods and uh that's what cameron's here to show us today i know cameron will go a little bit more in depth as to what the applications are um and you know some of those intricacies like i talked about um to be able to do all this without getting errors i know that there's a couple that are very famous in my mind and uh so on and so forth but uh if you have any questions go ahead and type them into the the chat panel as well and we'll go ahead and address those either during the session if we have some time or at the end of the session during our dedicated q a um but with that i think that's everything i needed to introduce cameron um did you have anything else to add before we get started that's great cool let's uh let's go through it okay great thanks nigel yeah so like you said today we're gonna go over adaptive cables tubes and uh other sweep features in inventor now just as a review a sweet feature a sweep is a feature that creates 3d geometry by pushing a two-dimensional profile along a path and the key feature the key idea of a sweep is that it maintains a constant cross-section along the entire path now an adaptive sweep is one whose path is controlled by geometry of other entities so that when those entities change the sweeps path changes to adapt and here are a couple of examples uh of geometry that can be created as sweeps other examples would include like rigid and flexible electrical conduit hydraulic and pneumatic hoses any hanging ropes and cables etc adding adaptivity to the sweeps gives them the power to update themselves as the overall design changes for example a belt passing over a series of pulleys and idlers can adjust itself if the pulley's positions are changed this saves valuable time over manually adjusting the belt geometry each time so today we're going to take a look at three examples that will illustrate the fundamental concepts of using adaptivity in 2d and 3d sweeps we'll look at controlling the sweep geometry as much or as little as needed and also finally working with three-dimensional splines through the two-dimensional interface of your monitor and mouse it could be a little challenging at times to kind of manipulate that geometry so i'll show you some techniques for getting through that so without further ado let's switch over to inventor and uh go through our first example so here we've got um like a piping system we've just shown the relevant sections of it but let's say we've got a piece a section of piping that's going this direction and another section of piping that's going this direction and as i rotate the view you'll see you know they're not in the same plane and we want to run a flexible hose from the one pipe run over to the other pipe run and like i said because they're not in the same plane we're going to need that's going to be a three-dimensional curve that we're going to follow there so we're going to want to create a 3d sweep to get to that point and we're also going to want to make it adaptive just in case in either of these pipe runs needs to shift its position then we don't you know the the hose itself is going to adapt itself to make sure that it's connected at each end no matter what and all right so let's uh let's let's get started here so the first thing i want to do is i've got a couple of fittings i've got a connection on each of the pipe runs but i need to actually have a connection from my hose as well so i'm going to go ahead and just constrain i've got a couple hose fittings that i've placed here to use and we'll just constrain this one over here we'll just throw an insert constraint on that that's good enough for now at this point not too concerned about the rotational degree of freedom that's remaining it should be fine without worrying about that okay so now i've got a couple of host fittings that we can connect with and so you'll see uh it's like a cam and groove style connection there and then this is a shank that the hose would actually fit over and then you clamp it down to make sure the hose stays on the fitting and what we're going to do here in order to make this adaptive we want to go ahead and start creating this hose piece for the hose in place we'll use this create component in place command and i'm just going to call this should work and then i want i i do want to constrain the sketch plane to the selected phasor plane i'll show you what that means here in a second so i'll hit ok and what i want to do is i want to pick basically where my hose is going to start is going to be on this face it'll start here and then there'll be a straight section here and then it'll basically have a 3d spline going over here and then another straight section then i'll end up on that face there so this is the face i'm going to start on so that's the one i'll pick to constrain my part two so it creates the hose part and places it and the constraint option actually creates a constraint if i switch over to assembly that's not gonna let me do that so let me just return back up so you can see it's actually created a flush constraint between this new parts uh x y plane and that face that i chose okay so now that'll be sure to stay constrained now the idea is again we're going to create a a 3d sweep so the first sweeter sweeps rely on two things first you have to have a path and you have to have a profile so first of all let's create our profile which will be just the 2d cross section of what our our hose is going to be and since it's going to start here that's where i'm going to place my uh my path so i'm going to start the 2d sketch command and because of the plane that i chose to start the face that i started the part on i'm going to go ahead and grab that xy plane because i know that's constrained to be in the right spot so go ahead and choose that and it always tries to change the orientation of the view to look face on to whatever plane you're sketching on which we're kind of in the assembly environment here so it kind of throws things off and makes things really throws the view off into a weird place so before i make any changes to the view to get that back i'll just hit f5 to return to my previous view and it got me kind of close there we go well you know we'll make more use of that later you'll see all right so the first thing i'm going to do here is i want to project the geometry of this outer edge so i'm going to grab that in and this is where the adaptivity comes in because i'm actually grabbing geometry that doesn't exist in this part file that i'm working in right this hose fitting exists in the assembly that's in the level above and so when i project that edge in it creates an adaptive link between this hose part and the assembly okay so i've got that now that i don't my hose isn't going to be that big so i'm not going to use that as my profile so i'm going to turn that into construction geometry and then i'm going to create a circle for the actual hose outside diameter and i do need an inside diameter so i'm going to go ahead and project this edge from the outside of that shank diameter so that'll be my inside edge of the the hose and then i'll just give that a thickness here okay so now i've got my profile so we'll go ahead and finish that sketch now for the path like i said we're going to create a 3d sketch so i'll go ahead and start my 3d sketch command and this first part is going to be a straight section from here to there and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and include geometry and that will bring in the geometry from again from that fitting and i'm going to go over here i'm going to do the same thing over here now you might have noticed this looks a little bit different and yeah there's an issue with what i'm doing here but i'm going to do it wrong first so i can show you what what can go wrong and then we'll come back and fix it and do it in a way that will work but so i'm going to create my first section here by picking on that point and that point so there's my straight section adventure's going a little slow on me today here come on there we go okay so there's my two straight sections of my spline i'm gonna go and create the spline here and i'll just pick my first point there i'm going to have one intermediate point so i can control the curve of the spline and then make sure i grab that point there hit create okay that'll place my spline we'll go ahead and i'll just gonna go through i'll come back and go through this in more detail once i demonstrate why what i'm particularly doing now isn't quite right so that's good enough for now it's a little not quite natural looking but that's okay we'll come back and revisit that so all right so i'm going to back out of this i got my sketch i'm not going to create the sweep yet because i'm going to show you what's going to go wrong with this sketch so you'll notice this is adaptive here but this 3d sketch doesn't show the adaptivity symbol next to it and that's going to be the root of the issue so if i come back up to my assembly and we adjust the position of this sub assembly let's just say we let's just push it out instead of 40 we'll make it 48. you'll see the issue there my 3d sketch has not adaptively adjusted to the position of that fitting okay all right i'm going to undo that constraint and then we'll come back into our hose and take a look at what's going on here so in this 3d sketch when we projected it in and you and you can kind of get a hint from the coloration that's going on of the sketch entities here when i projected these entities in it they came in as green and they created an adaptive link with the hose fitting but when i projected in the 3d sketch they came in as blue and if i take a look at my turn on my constraint glyphs you'll see the difference here that's a projected geometry glyph there but this when it comes in doesn't come in as projected geometry it just comes in it just drops a circle into the 3d space and then it locks it in place with lock fixed constraints and so that basically means those can't move so even if the geometry moves they stay in place so that's definitely not what we want right so i'm going to go ahead i'm going to delete this 3d sketch and we're going to do something a little bit different so the main problem is here that 3d sketches uh don't really work with adaptivity but 2d sketches do work with that activity so what we're going to do is we're going to take advantage of the adaptability of 2d sketches to bring in the geometry that we need to that needs to be adaptive and then we'll connect between those with a 3d sketch and the easiest way to do that is to just by doing what we did with this first profile sketch is we're just going to start a 2d sketch in the at the relevant point so we need a basically a point here that our spline can pass through we need a point here at the end of this fitting and a point here at the back of this fitting and the easiest way to get those is to just start a sketch on that face and when i do that again it's just a view i'll hit f5 to get back to the view i was on and then you'll see it actually does a couple things for us here it creates this work plane that is adaptively constrained to the end of that fitting and now when i project the geometry of this curve here it's going to bring in an adaptive reference to that fitting just like before and now i've got the point that i can work through and this is all adaptive okay so that's all i need for that sketch so i'll just finish that i'll start a new 2d sketch over here do the exact same thing at this end hit f5 to get my view back project the geometry and we're done there finish sketch start the sketch there projector geometry and there we go so now we've got all the entities we need they're all adaptive ready for our 3d sketch so now we'll go ahead and start the 3d sketch create our straight line elements between those points and then we'll grab our spline again now i like to use there's two different types of splines you can create for this sort of thing i like to use the interpolation spline because it places a vertex anywhere you place an intermediate point is a point where the spline must pass through and i find it's a lot easier to control the path of my spline that way than the control vertex and so that's what i'm going to be that's what i typically use for this sort of situation now i'm going to put one intermediate point just like before and it i don't really care where it ends up at first because i can adjust it later and then i just need to make sure it gets connected there and then we need to make sure that this comes off tangent we don't want our hose isn't going to come out and kink off the direction straight off the bat so we want to add a tangent constraint between here and here and then come over here and add a tangent constraint between here and there but you do have to be careful you want to look at the direction that's actually going to start with because if this sometimes it might default to going off this direction and swinging back and if you create the tangent constraint at that point then it's going to tangent this way instead of this way which is not what we want in this case it's a little i think it's probably fine but if you're if it's if you're not sure then we can just drag this intermediate point off to the side until it's obvious that we're going to get the right solution create our tangent okay so now basically all that's left is just moving this intermediate point until we get about the shape that we want and this is the part where it gets a little tricky working with a three-dimensional entity in the two-dimensional plane of my screen and with the limitation of my mouse can only move in the x and y directions right so um in the plane of my screen so sometimes moving stuff around like this seems to be a little too far this way because my host is kind of coming back this way and then going over so i would need to bring my my point further in this direction but if i'm working in this plane there's no way to do that i can only drag it in the other two planes and so what i find the easiest to do is use my view cube to orient to my front and side plane views and so that i know that i can at least drag the point in the planes that i need to so and then so i'll get it to look about right in one view like let's say that looks okay in that view and then i'll check the next view here and see if that looks about right yeah that's not too bad and then just check the top view just to make sure that one looks okay too so that curve doesn't look too sharp so that looks pretty good so um you could either do that just eyeball it usually with flexible things like hoses and cables and stuff eyeballing it's good enough you're not trying to get too precise but in the case where you might need some more control over this you can certainly add some constraints we'll talk about that in a little bit but you know the idea is you could you could move this up and down if you needed a little more slack in your hose then it's going to tend to droop down a little more and then come back up and you'll see this is one of the issues with working this in this uh two-dimensional workspace as well is that i when i try to drag it up and down it doesn't actually go up and down for whatever reason inventor is limiting me to only being able to drag this point in that direction but if i change my view sometimes it's a little better this view is no better that's exactly the same but if i come to the side view then it allows me to drag it up and down so that becomes a little challenging to maneuver that around but in the cases where i need to move it and it's not letting me there's another option we've got this 3d transform option up here so basically select that start that command click that point and then it gives us some arrows that we can drag it around in either direction of this plane and then if i need to adjust it in the other plane i can just keep the command active switch to my other view and then the commands or the yeah the controls flip to work in this plane instead so if you find that adventures for whatever reason sometimes it does limit you sometimes it doesn't and it's just i haven't really found any kind of sense to when it does when it doesn't if you find that it's doing that to you then go to the 3d transform command and it'll let you drag stuff around so you could put a little more slack into your line if you need to or if you want to make sure there's no low points in your line then you'll definitely want to remove that slack make sure it's a little bit of a tighter tighter fit like that all right so let's call that good and there's our our path is done let's go ahead and finish that sketch and once that's okay that's done the inventor's going a little slow on me today so here's we're going to start create our sweep feature and then we have to choose our profile which is right there and then our path which is right there so there's our hose i'm going to darken that so we can see it easier okay so there's our hose now let's test the adaptivity by adjusting the position of this sub assembly here now if i move this out to 48 now you'll see the end the ends stay connected okay and it's you can even change like the angle i've got an angle constraint that i put in here like if i change this to let's try 10 degrees you'll see it even adjusts to fit that angle there so really cool really powerful to be able to do that it would also work if i move this one around it works either way because i've i've set it to be adaptively constrained on either end on both ends so one thing to keep in mind is that there are limitations to how much this thing can move before the sweet feature will fail or the maybe the 3d sketch path will fail there's definitely things that can go wrong if i you know push this way out you know over here then the you've got to keep in mind that it's always got to pass through that point the that intermediate point that we created and that intermediate point is not constrained to anything it's not adaptively set to follow anything it's always going to stay in that spot relative to the origin of its part and so if we move this way over here then the hose has got to come down pass through that point and then move try and make its way back to wherever this end connection happens to be and if that forces the sweep path to go through such a sharp curve that it can't compute then it's going to fail um or you also have to watch out for any place where you have tangencies remember we added those tangent constraints at each end of the spline there are two possible solutions to the tangent so you can either come out the way we have it now or it could flip around and be tangent the other direction and so sometimes drastic changes like if i were to move this way over here there's a possibility it doesn't always but there's a possibility that it could solve that tangent constraint the other way and then instead of coming out and tangenting up it would come out and tangent back which the sweep path is not going to be able to solve that so your suit feature will fail so you do have to keep in mind the limitations of the sweet features of the 3d sketch path of any constraints that you put in place um but it is you know pretty you know as long as you're not making gigantic changes and it's it's pretty good um let's go ahead and let's see we can force a failure so you can see what i'm talking about so right now that's set at negative 42 inches from that plane if i were to just set it to be instead of negative 42 i just make it 42 that's going to flip it over to the other side and there we go we've got a failure so yeah because it's trying to again go through that intermediate point that's still over here and then swing back and come back in so let's take a look at that so the sweep feature for sure has failed it's possible that the 2d sketches or the 3d sketches failed but the 3d sketch path is fine it's fine to just do that it doesn't have any failure there but the sweep feature is having to go around this kind of sharp curve here which i'm guessing is just too sharp for that for that profile to make that curve without crossing in onto itself and so that's why it's failing now you could just if you needed it to be here you could just adjust where this intermediate point is um maybe adjust the angle of this so that it's pointing in a more natural direction or if that's not an option just adjust this so that that sweep profile or that sweet path can make its curve around without crossing over itself see if that was good enough so yeah there you go that was good enough there so again just it's always a good idea to keep in mind what the limitations are going to be what the range of motion you're going to need to account for is you know how how different can these positions of these two entities be from each other all things to keep in mind um another thing to keep in mind is that intermediate point like i said is not constrained there's nothing controlling that so it's just gonna there's nothing that's gonna move it'll stay there until we tell it to do otherwise either manually by coming here and dragging it like we did or you could try to add some constraints um or some dimensions or even uh yes like parameters to control its location like if you had a parameter that tells you how high this is supposed to be you could say this is always supposed to be at two thirds of that height or or something like that or if you want to continue to use adaptivity one method you could do is uh take advantage of these 2d sketches like we've got and let me show you what i mean i'll start a 2d sketch on this plane and then i'll project the work point from there and there you'll see it's dropping those onto that plane which i don't really care what where the plane is what i'm going for here is i want to grab a reference dimension from there to there make sure it's going to be vertical and this is complaining because it's over constraining but that's what i want i want a reference dimension there so so that's going to change as those points move closer and further away from each other and so now what i can do is go back into my 3d sketch come on and now i can actually add a dimension from uh this point here up to this plane and say that's always going to be some factor of that other reference dimension i didn't know what the d7 so that's going to be d7 times 0.6 or something like that like two-thirds of the way and then of course you could do the same thing for i've done it for the y direction here you can do the same for the x and the z directions to you know give them some kind of formula that controls them based on the other geometry and so now if i move this unit uh vertically if i change its position let's drop that down to negative 80. hopefully that's not too far there we go you'll see that that intermediate point adjusted because that reference it changed the position of this geometry which changed the value of this reference dimension which then changed the value of the location of that intermediate point so you can see it there okay so that's one way to just use adaptive geometry without having to resort to parameterizing everything sometimes parameterizing is a good way to go sometimes you don't want to do that so this is another option all right let's take a look at our next example here i've got this frame with a panel here that an instrument over here and i need to run a tube or a cable from this panel over to that instrument but i want it to follow along the path of this frame in fact i've even got little clamps that are going to be holding that tube in place at specific points on the frame and so i want to be able to route that through those tubes to get to this point over here and so we're going to follow basically the same concept as what we did before but instead of just a single intermediate point going from you know a loose tube from one end to the other we have to go through these intermediate points we start the same way we create a component in place and i've already done that here just to kind of save us some time but i basically started it on this face here so it's constrained to the side of the panel if we go into there again the idea is we'll start the same way we'll create 2d sketches to bring in this geometry and this geometry to make sure those are adaptive and then we do the same thing on the other end here so let's go ahead and do that so i'll start my 2d sketch command start there hit f5 to get my view back project geometry that's what we need and then come on and then we'll start another 2d sketch on this backplane i think that's actually where i started the the part so rather than if i click i could totally just click that back face again but it's going to create another work plane when i've already got one there my origin plane should already be at that point let's just double check yeah oh nope that's on the face oops that's the wrong thing there we go side view there we go oh no looks like i did it on the front face so i just duplicated a plane oh well but so instead of duplicating a plane you could just sketch on the the origin plane that was already there but yeah we'll we'll just keep going okay so now click on the back face uh start a sketch there get my view back project that geometry finish sketch then do the same thing down here sketch there project finish your sketch okay and then we're going to basically do the same thing where we've got some straight sections here and at the other end and then we're going to do a spline section but in this case where we need to pass through those intermediate points what we're going to do is we're going to have we're going to do the same thing here project uh start a sketch on this face project that edge gotta start a sketch on this face project that edge to make sure we're adaptive to this component so let's go ahead and start that all right finish our sketch okay and then we would do the same thing all along but i've already done these ones just to save some time so you don't have to watch me do that and okay so then these are there's going to be some straight sections along our path between these points and all along here and you'll see i've already done that as well for some of these and then instead of one giant spline we're just going to run intermediate or just splines between each straight section with probably just one intermediate point in between so that we can kind of give it a wavy look and kind of control its shape that way so let's go ahead and do that i've already got my 3d sketch that i've started to save us some time but i need to drag this down here so that it's got reference to these other sketches that i just created and then we'll go and start our straight section here and here and one more here and then our throw in our spline again our interpolation again make sure it's connected there and then the intermediate point uh i'm not too concerned about where that's at at the moment i guess i'll move it down there there make sure you hit create and then okay and create our tangent constraints and then we'll just go through here quickly and connect up these last ones oh why are you going so slow in winter oh okay actually something wrong on that one let's do that one again come on that one's gonna be in a weird spot but that's okay adjust it yeah anyway i think you get the idea all right so now we've got those intermediate points let's throw in our tangent constraints i definitely need to make sure those stay tangent i have to check this one okay that one should be fine come on it's okay all right then the last thing we really need to do is just adjust those intermediate points that the tube is going in a sensible direction this one might be a little low so if you drag that up get it from above oh yeah that's sticking way too far out that way it's not going to let me drag it though so let me use my 3d transform move that back into a sensible place yeah it looks pretty good call that good this one it's not too bad as it is let's look at it from above yeah that looks fine this one's a little odd not quite right so we want to make sure it doesn't interfere with our leg there might be a little too low okay i'll call that good yeah some of these are pretty far out there oh man come on okay you get the idea again all right so let's uh should be now a complete path we can use for a sweep grab our profile oh i didn't create a profile let's do that um let's go back into that sketch and make that construction there we go there make it a little easier to see here so there you go so again you got to keep in mind that those intermediate points are going to tend to stay where they are so you know it's if the frame changes width depending on how you've constrained these i've set these so that these two work this one's six inches from the inside of this leg and this one is six inches from the inside of this leg so as this frame gets wider you know this one will stay in position when this one will move across and then the path will update except for the intermediate point because that's not constrained so i'll have to either manually adjust that quickly or find some way to constrain that or something like that but uh that's the main idea there so if this is what you can do if you want to hit through intermediate points uh another option you could do instead if you didn't necessarily need to care exactly where like if you didn't have guide points maybe you're just going to have the guys to cable tie this in the field and you're not too concerned about exactly hitting intermediate points you could instead just do this with all a single spline from here all the way to here just with a bunch of intermediate points instead of a big drooping cable down all the way down to there you could just hit it put an intermediate point about there put an intermediate point about there let's just do one real quick just so you can kind of see what i mean let's go back into our oh gotta go into the part let's go into our 3d sketch we've already created since we've got some endpoints to start with let's say we create one big spline from here and then maybe hit an intermediate point in a few places to kind of follow a path all the way down to here and then make a tangent of course oh that one went the wrong way didn't check beforehand come on yep that one's slightly going the other way so let's drag intermediate point this way just enough so it solves the tangent constraint the other way there we go so yeah so now you've got you can add more intermediate points if you need them or you can just drag them around until they're about the right spot that you'll tell the you get get the idea that the cables being run along the frame but you're not being too picky about exactly where those points are you know if you need to add additional ones you just right click on the spline and do insert point and then just pick along the point where you want it to be so you can add one there and then that gives you another control point you can drag around so so i've done that in cases where i didn't have specific points i needed to hit but i did want want to show it following along a certain path that i want the tube to be run that's a quick way to do that so just another way to do it all right let's uh let's take a look at our last example which is going to be a little bit different than what we've seen so far instead of using um like a swoopy bendy path it's basically this is going to be something that's in tension like in this case we've got a cable running through several sheaves but the same concept would apply for a belt running across pulleys and idlers same idea just instead of a circular cross section for a cable that would have you know a rectangular cross section or like a v belt shaped cross section for or a belt and the idea here is where we've got all these in a single plane instead of using a 3d sketch i've just used a 2d sketch to build this path i've already got one here just so you can see it so what we'll let's go ahead and build one so i'll turn the visibility of this guy off and i'll show you how i built this one which is using similar concepts before but it's slightly different so we'll create our part in place let's just call this a cable three i think i've got a view already we'll start it there and uh we are going to be doing a sweep so we need to both a profile and a path so let's go ahead and do our path we'll we sketched on that plane or we started our part on that plane there so we'll go ahead and sketch on that plane so i don't duplicate my plane like i did last time and then project that in that gives us our adaptive geometry to the assembly entity and uh let's put our path in there oh that's not constrained i missed the point coincident constraint there turn that so it's not uh so it's construction geometry so there's our profile and you know what i don't think i want my profile there because this is going to come out it's going to go straight from there down to here so that's going to have a sharp angle bend right at that point which you wouldn't have in real life but for the purposes of this demonstration it would be fine it's just if the path is there that might cause some issues figuring out what the what it's going to be so let's let's delete that instead let's create our sketch back here put our profile there instead there we go okay now um in order to get the adaptive geometry in we're going to use the same technique where we start a 2d sketch on the face where we need to point project the geometry and that's good and then over here on our endpoint let's make sure we grab that start a 2d sketch on that face project the geometry and then you could have it go on if you want to i don't really care too in this case in this example all right so we've got our start and our end points but now we want to be able to have it wrap around these sheaves and it for it to be adapted so if these sheaves move then the path will adapt itself so in this case the way these shoes are modeled i've got it's kind of got this this little raceway for where the cable goes through you can see it there and this uh the center line of so the cable when it's bottomed out is going to be here but the center the center line of the cable is going to be running along about up here somewhere now the way i've modeled these this surface here this cylindrical diameter is at the the center point of where the cable would be for a cable of this size and so i've got already got the geometry that i need i can just project this circular edge into my sketch and that's going to give me the point where my uh cable center line is going to pass through so that's where my path will go if your sheaves or whatever geometry you're trying to adapt it doesn't already have the geometry you need you'll have to do something different either add some geometry to the parts if you can if you can't you'll have to get clever with parameters or something to make sure you end up because you want to make sure the path is the center line we don't want to have the the path hit this bottom point here because that's not the center line of the the cable so if i run my if i run our sweep and our profile goes through that'll put the cable down inside the the race of the sheave there so we don't want to do that um you want to keep in mind that you're working with the center line all right let's go back into our part and okay so like i said in this case these all these shoes are in a plane so i can get away with doing a 2d sketch instead of a 3d sketch and that's going to be on this plane there and so i can just directly project in the geometry that i need and it's going to come in as adaptive where we couldn't do that with a 3d sketch we had to make use of like intermediate 2d sketches to bring our adaptivity in but that's already got what i need let's go ahead and make all those construction so they don't interfere with inventor figuring out where the path is and then let's start running our our lines so we're going to have a little straight section here just to connect to our our profile oh i've got to project that point in i've actually got to project both of these points in because with a 2d or a 3d sketch it can already get access to parts or geometry that's in the same part but for a 2d sketch it doesn't do that i have to project the geometry from these other sketch entities and you'll see it brings in the little point entity there we go now i've got something i can attach these lines to all right now down here we just want to go down here and one thing you want to watch out for here is where inventor is going to try and infer constraints some of them are good like this inference tangent that's a constraint we want to create so that would be fine so you can go ahead and let inventor infer that but you do want to watch out see that where it's snapping to that point there it wants to create a coincident constraint there which is definitely not what we want which i think i'm pretty sure that's just a quadrant so you like that if you go around you'll see there's four points that it tries to snap to so just keep that in mind to make sure you're not clicking on that so either click away from a point you know for sure is not going to be the quadrant it's not going to infer that or you can try and get that tangent constraint to infer just be careful if that tangent's near the quadrant who knows what you get if you click on it so i just find it easier just to click some point you know for sure is not going to infer anything and then we can come back in and add the tangent constraints later i mean i guess that's not the end of the world if it doesn't for something you don't want you can always go back in and delete the inferred constraint but if you don't notice it then my cause is medic okay so it looks like i did it for a couple of those tangent constraints i'm going to turn on my constraints so i can see which ones still need tangents this one's this one here is good but i do need one here and i do need one here there i got that one okay so that part of the path is fully constrained all we have left to do is just fill in these little arcs and so i'm going to use a circular arc i'm going to use a center point arc that makes the most sense since i've already got a projected center point and we just connect those again making sure that being careful you it's inferring the constraints that you want you don't want to end up with an arc that's got a broken path an incomplete an open loop if you will that happens quite a lot with arcs i'm just dragging these to make sure a lot of times arcs will constrain at the center and the first point you pick but a lot of times not at the second point you pick looks like in this case it's actually done both so i just to test that i just grab the arc and drag it and if it's not constrained the unconstrained end will kind of move around so that looks good all right so we've got our path let's go ahead and create our sweep with our profile and our path and like i said there's going to be that sharp corner there but it's fine for this demo but you'd obviously want to do something different in a real scenario let's turn up the contrast on this there we go so there's our path there's our our cable that's passing through our sheaves and now i've got some parameters that are set up for the x and y locations of each of these sheaves so let's just adjust these let's uh let's see that's the y direction of the second one let's push that up a little bit let's push that to 18 that moves around let's adjust the x 15. there you go so you've got a little more control over your components and the the cables will adaptively adjust cable or belt or whatever it is that's going through here again always keep in mind the limitations if you push these too far then things weird things happen your sketch could break or it could do weird stuff like let's say if i push this one up above so it's no longer passing underneath it wouldn't really be touching anymore but we've still told it to be contangent so it does weird stuff let's see that's the sheet 3y let's push that up 18 that's still good you can still see there's a little bit of a an arc there let's push that to 19 [Music] that's still good 21. ooh barely it's barely touching it so if we push beyond that we know for sure that's gonna weird things okay so it looks like it's i mean we told it to be tangent and it's you know obeying that constraint but uh it's kind of hard to tell with my wireframe view here if i turn the shaded view back on you'll see it's actually it's staying tangent but now instead of the arc being a little piece here it's wrapping all the way around so that's obviously bad so it didn't fail but it's obviously giving us a bad result so you just want to keep that stuff in mind sometimes if you push it beyond um the limit and try to go back inventor won't solve things the way you want them to so if i bring this back it might not resolve that back to something good but in this case it looks like it did we lucked out on that one but sometimes you're not so lucky um make sure there's anything else i wanted to cover here no i think that's it so i mean obviously like i said this applies to not just cables but you could do uh ropes or you could do belts uh conveyor belts that sort of thing um anything that needs to follow a path that has to adjust to other entities that are not a part of the the part that the path is in that this sweep is in so um i think that was all i wanted to cover let's uh let's see if we've got any questions looks like we've got one from jeffrey it says are those flex hose connections you used in the demo in inventor's content center uh like you're talking about these camera groove fittings no i these are not in content center these are ones that i developed myself i did end up adding them to content center as a contents or family but they were custom ones i had to create myself hey can you hear me okay cam uh yeah okay cool i just had to adjust my microphone there um so yeah that's the first question that you took care of um let's just jump to the second question um is it possible to limit the length of the 3d sketch to round numbers uh yes it is that's a great question uh let me open up this one well i wanna open it up in context here we'll go into our spline our 3d sketch there are ways to control the spline length maybe that's only for tube and pipe you know you can adjust the tension which affects the length but that's not really giving you a value that is directly related to length there is an option for that but i think that's actually specifically if you're building a flexible hose inside of the tube and pipe environment it has an option it's if you've never used that before it's kind of similar to this although some of this is a it's a lot easier to do it's a little more automated in that you you choose a fitting you tell it where to connect it'll automatically connect the fitting at one end connect the fitting at the other end and then it runs a hose in between and you can add intermediate points to control the path but then it's also got a control to set the hose length so you can either have it not be fixed or you can tell i want this to be a fixed length at 18 inches or whatever and it'll adjust spline tension so that it stays at that length which is a great feature for for running hoses but that that's specifically only available in the pipe module which is another definitely another way to run hoses i just wanted to show this method is a different way of doing it if you don't want to you know if you're just creating one one-off hose sometimes the tube and pipe module is a lot more overhead there's a lot more set up required to get the tube and pipe module to do what you needed to do and sometimes it's just not worth setting all that up for just one little piece of hose or cable or whatever so that's why this that's where situations like that is where this method comes in handy in uh the bill materials cam does the pipe length or the the tube length show no nope it doesn't that's something um i've in the past i've written like a little eye logic rule that um i can tell it the name of a 3d sketch and it'll measure the length of a path maybe that's something we can cover in a future ava um so that and then i've set the ilogic rule to trigger have an event trigger that when you know the part geometry changes it'll run that rule so anytime the part changes it automatically refreshes that that parameter that stores the length that's measured from the path and then you can pull that path length into the description in your bill materials or have it be its own column um does it matter which section you start and end the straight sections i guess when you're adding those like intermediate sections um as far as like whether i don't think so like whether you start from the beginning or the end and like go forward or go backwards on the path i've never seen that affect anything so i in general i would say no there might be weird niche cases where that might come into play but i've never run into a case like that um i mean just for my own brain logically i just tend to go from one end to the other but i i guess i don't always stick to that sometimes i might pick here first and go to there yep but i haven't seen that effect anything um can you add intermediate points to an existing spline yep you just uh make sure you select the spline right click on it and then hit insert point it doesn't insert it when you hit that then it kind of starts an insert point command then you have to go through and pick a specific point along the line where you want the point and it drops it in there then you can adjust it from there yep and you can delete them too if you have a point that you don't need you right click on it and delete and it'll readjust itself yeah you just need to be in the context of a sketch it's like the same thing as adding geometry to a sketch um you just go back into the sketch itself this is all coming from the sketch um you can go into the sketch and do whatever you want um change the profile add points move stuff around delete sections add sections it's all just in the context of working in a sketch so yeah i think that i think a lot of us are very familiar with being in here sometimes banging our heads against the wall um that's a different problem entirely all right uh will this work with different fitting ends such as hydraulic fittings as well um i don't see why not yeah absolutely you can use any type of fitting um almost any type of fitting you're going to need is going to have some like straight section like this and so you'll want to find a point where you can you know start your first sketch so you can grab that center point start your second sketch to grab the second center point and then you've got your starting point that gives you you always want to put like that tangent constraint on there to control the direction that the spline comes out because you don't want that to be loose otherwise you get you know your hoses like with a sharp bend right there coming off in weird directions but pretty much any fitting i've ever needed has got some geometry i can use for that yep and rodney's asking if you could share the ilogic rule um to get the path as a custom property i don't think you have that ready cam right i'm assuming yeah i don't have that ready it's not something i thought up to present here um we can tell you what we can do like a blog post and put that ilogic rule up on our website give me some time to put that together maybe check back next month or something and see we'll put that up so you can see it it's it's not complicated it's a pretty simple rule but um it's got some calls to the api that if you're not familiar with that sort of thing might be hard to dig up on your own yep and then there's another question from bruce is there a way to create a nurbs path first directly um possibly i've never needed to do that so i don't know i've not tried um i've always just been able to use either a 2d or 3d sketch for the path and then use the sweep command to create the geometry for me um yeah so i don't know maybe but i've never needed that all right um i think that's everything for questions um i know there there's a couple of people asking about recordings of this yeah so it's being recorded right now uh once our marketing team gets a hold of the recording and does some uh some editing to the video they'll upload it to our youtube channel so that should happen sometime in the next week or so so if you want to go ahead and review this go ahead and take a look sometime in the next week but i think that's everything for questions uh cam again thank you so much for joining us great morning uh really enjoyed the session i'm sure a lot of people saw it as uh as useful as i did great glad to be here well thanks again um and thanks again everyone for joining us today uh next week we've got thanksgiving so uh we will not be hosting an ava but we will be sharing our um our holiday schedule moving forward i know that you know christmas and new year sometimes pops up in the middle of the week um and aba is not the you know it doesn't take precedence over turkey dinner so we will see you all in two weeks thanks again everybody and thanks again cam we'll talk to you soon

Channel: KETIV Technologies

Views: 7,646

Keywords: autodesk, akn_include, Autodesk, Autodesk Inventor, autodesk inventor tutorial, autodesk inventor 2020, autodesk inventor tutorial for beginners, inventor 2021, inventor 2021 tutorial, Inventor 2021 adaptive modeling, adaptive modeling machine learning, adaptive insights modeling, tube, tubes in inventor, flexible tube solidworks, flexible tube or cable, flexible cable repair, modeling, cad, cam, ketiv, autodesk virtual academy, autodesk tutorial 2020, constraints in inventor

Id: gQZzdyYKjwM

Length: 59min 1sec (3541 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020