An Introduction to Inventor’s Frame Generator and 3D Sketching

welcome everyone and thank you for attending today's webcast an introduction to inventors frame generator and 3d sketching our presenter today is Kendrick Cooper he's a solutions engineer with Hagerman & Company before we get started I want to let you know that you're in listening only mode if you have questions during the presentation you can type those into the question panel on the right hand side of your screen they'll be addressed at the end of the presentation as we close down the session today you'll be prompted to fill out a survey we ask that you take a few moments to fill that out additionally all registrants will receive a follow-up email containing a link for the recording of this presentation I will hand things over to Kendra Thank You Ashley welcome everyone to today's presentation as Ashley mentioned we're gonna be talking about haha wrong title that's sheet metal webinar actually we should be talking about the frame generator so I'm on there own presentation let's try that again okay here we go we're going to be talking about the frame generator and 3d sketching I am your presenter kindred Cooper and in the background we have Kevin Bosch who's going to be addressing the questions and answer section and we are we are going to have some designated time at the end of today's presentation to cover the QA so let's get right into it this slide is obviously for people who cannot hear me but it's also a good slide to showcase the QA panel should pop up with the go-to meeting manager that came up when you've logged into the meeting so you can enter your questions into this panel and Kevin's going to address them as we go through the presentation and again we'll have a designated time at the end of the presentation to address them as well so demonstrate in frame generator what is it used for there's a lot of different uses that it has in industry you're primarily gonna focus on structural framing for machine footprints that's really what it's designed for you've got a couple of other offshoot industries that it can fit into things like jig and fixture rigging the framework for that framework for small structures we're talking things like a lean-to or a storage shed or test stand or test equipment things of that nature rigging for trailer beds car haulers things like that it's right up that alley for for those types of situations when you're talking with structure framing again stressing small structure we're keeping the pieces or the overall footprint of the structure down to a minimal you don't want to take this and try to model up a 20 story apartment building various reasons for that can't invent or do it sure but how much time are you gonna spend trying to do an inventor versus something else that's more tailor-made so it's got a lot of uses in industry so what it's not designed for is like I mentioned something like a high-rise office complex apartment building something like that the reason it's not designed for that situation let's say your job is to make videogame characters and you've got AutoCAD can autocad make a 3d video game character yeah it can it's got the shapes and ability to do that can you move it sure you can move it and take still images and eventually make a movie of the character walking how long are you going to spend trying to do that that's the same thing here if that's your job and you need to make a game character there are more tailor-made products for that things such as 3d studio max or Maya same situation applies here if your job is doing large-scale structural framing there are other tools that are more tailored made for that inventor can do it but it will end up taking you longer in inventor as opposed to the other two tools such as Revit structure so a large-scale building structure you don't want to tackle it with that the other things you might want to consider there are things like Reed pipe connections or flexible tubing type situations there are structural shapes in the frame generator for tubing those are really intended for things like handrails and ladder guides and things like that if you're looking at piping and tubing then another tailor-made product is going to be inventor tubing pop so if you're looking at something here like here in the center could we do this with inventor with the frame generator sure what I rather do it with tubing pop in inventor yeah that's a much more suited environment to tackle a design like this the other benefit with tailor-made or specialty packages like Revit structure for the structure on the right Revit structure will automatically do coping and part of that utility you tell it what size flange connector you want to use what type of flange connector if it's a tee or an L bracket how many bolts per side or how much loading what configuration the bolts all of that is built into the utility that's going to notch out or cope out this piece apply the flange apply the fasteners and it's done one utility one-stop-shop that's the benefit of a tailor-made product like that when inventor we could still do this but it's going to be a manual processes you can I'm just going to take us longer to do it so getting to the basics of this framing 101 the way to approach this through inventor you start by either creating a 2d or 3d sketch or you can create a solid model or surface model most commonly you're going to go with a 2d or a 3d sketch that becomes your skeletal model for the modeling process so if you look over here at the lower left hand corner we have a basic skeletal sketch part now what this actually is it's a 2d sketch on top and a 3d sketch for the legs and the cross members it could have been multiple 2d sketches the software is flexible you're not stuck into one workflow so that's going to become the basics and the foundation of your framing assembly you can also use a solid model so what we have here on the right hand corner this represents the overall footprint of a 10 foot by 15 foot horizontal machining Center this is just the overall shape of it no real details we just have the basic shape those edges become the framing centers so we can use those edges and you can also do point-to-point frame alignment instead of just edges the same principle applies if this is a surface model instead of a solid you're still allowed access to those edges to use them as frame centers and that also you can take your own custom shapes and publish them everybody's familiar with the almighty 80/20 shapes so you can take those shapes publish those into the frame generators generator engine as well what you get out of the box are pretty much your standard shapes you've got your eye beams w's L brackets T brackets round Square and rectangular bar stock and solid or tubing stock and solid bar stock as well so if you need something custom you can certainly plug that in and use that there is a utility for your custom shapes if we have time certainly fire that up and show you a little bit about it the shape author comes with your inventor you have to create a reed rod right library in your content center that is critical without having a writable library in your content center you're not going to be able to publish anything whether it's this or pieces into the content center the contact center libraries by default all of the stock libraries are read-only you can't write any changes to them so you have to create your own library if you need help with that certainly contact us we'll be happy to help then you sketch out your frame shape and do a simple little extrusion now you've got the basics to get this published so what can the frame generator do well you've got the steel industry like I mentioned for handrails and framing and I beams and things like that but you also have non steel or non metals industries it can get into a little bit a previously I mentioned that you don't want to model up anything that's like a large structure but smaller structures are certainly feasible you've got things like storage sheds and lean tubes the storage shed that's in my own backyard I modeled up with inventor frame generator right now I'm actually working on redoing my back deck and doing the same thing using the frame generator to lay out all the pieces get cut links get an overall build plan going and I'm using the shape author to publish in two by fours 1 by 3s 2 bus sixes things like that things that are not part of the standard content center shape library it's flexible to work across multiple industries so let's just get right into it switch over to my other screen okay so what we're gonna be looking at is we've got a large platform here and this is perfectly suited for frame generator you've got a lot of different frame members going on you've got the underlying structure down here below you've got the framework to support the platform the wok pads you've got the stilt structure the beam structure to support that the crossmembers you've got the stair railing the stairs themselves having the base of the stairs the railing for the stairs and then the safety rail up the top all of this is right up the frame generator alley everything in here you see can be done with the frame generator with ease so what you start with is a piece part with some sketches in it so I'll start out with this guy actually that's wrong one I need the actual piece part there we go so what you're looking at is just a basic 2d sketch nothing fancy nothing special standard sketch constrained properly centered from this that's the bare minimum you need you can throw that into an assembly and you can start applying frame members to it but I'm not done with it I need some legs and cross braces on this so I'm gonna use this piece part and cover the 3d sketching portion of our webinar so when you launch your different sketch environments you have 2d sketch and you have 3d sketching when you go into the 3d sketch mode this is where a lot of people start to sweat because it's very foreign to us we're not used to coming in here utilizing this environment it kind of throws us a curve ball our brains are already used to thinking in a 3d mode but we're not used to working in a 3d mode interface and that's where it throws us for a curve so you've got some familiar commands in here out of the 2d sketch environment you have line you have arc bends points dimensions constraints trim extend split a lot of familiar commands and then some that are kind of unknown these different unknown commands obviously they're going to bring you different capabilities to utilize in the environment things like a helical curve this allows you to create a helical curve for a spring type situation or a screw Thurid type situation or even a wound clock spring type situation and you can create that sketch line and use it to sweep geometry along that path for here we're going to start sketching out the lines for the legs of this platform and what I want to go through are some of the more advanced commands just to let you know what is capable inside the 3d sketch mode so for example when you look at some of the advanced command structures one of the commands is an intersection curve and while this doesn't necessarily apply to something like frame generating it does apply to shape manipulation so when you go into 3d sketch mode the intersection curve allows you to take different sketch elements or even projected sketch geometry it doesn't have to be scratch drawn geometry and what it's going to do in this situation it's gonna look at this top sketch curve and it's going to project it back in the negative Z direction then it's gonna look at the back sketch curve both of these are just 2d sketches on different planes and orientations gonna look at the back 2d sketch curve and project it up in positive Y where those intersect it will create the geometry as a 3d sketch curve so how do you utilize this well for something like this you can utilize this in the loft command so for example if you loft between the two base sketches you end up with a lofted surface that gives you some nice contours and curves that you can use for creating some geometry but if you then incorporate that 3d sketch curve that was created in the sequence of the loft you end up with a much more dramatic shape that you can then utilize for again additional surface or solid modeling what this actually is it's the start of a gas tank on a Honda motorcycle so if you look at it from the side profile you've got the rider back here on the right-hand side and the handlebars up here on the left-hand side so you can utilize something like that to get a much more advanced shape definition some of the other features inside the 3d sketch are command structures that allow you to utilize sketches and surfaces even solid surfaces not just surface geometry but you can utilize the commands such as project to a surface what this allows you to do is you can choose a set of curves it'd be better if they call them sketches but curves work so choose your set occurs then choose the face that you want to project those curves onto and you've got some options you can project just along a vector direction so it's going to project these perpendicular to your sketch plane to your 2d curved sketch plane or you can project to a closest point of the surface or even wrap them to a surface so when I hit OK what it actually ends up providing you is wrapped around that cylinder you see how it projects those curves straight through this gives you a path this gives you a continuous path that you can use to sweep along to cut out a groove a follower groove maybe even do some surface manipulation to cut this area cut out a pocket for a tool rest or who knows what kind of geometry you're going to be working with here another one of the options is to take a set of curves and wrap them around the face this is also handy if you have a particular arc length or line length and you need to see it wrap around a surface until it runs out of length so that's actually what's going to happen when I choose the face it wraps the arc continuously ran until it runs out of room now what happens if the arc gets longer or shorter well with an update command the result is going to change so if I shorten down the arc and change the curvature of it when I hit my local update you'll see the resulting projection changes so these are associative back to the geometry they're not just static projections they work just like project geometry does so in the 3d sketch environment you've got additional tools to help you manipulate that geometry the first thing that probably throws a lot of people when they come into that environment is the introduction of the little gizmo guy so when you go into the 3d sketch environment and you start the line command for example you'll notice at the origin there's been various names given to this it's changed identity a few times over the past releases but three gizmo seems to be one sticks from version to version you get this little 3d gizmo display and it allows you to control how you're going to sketch now we're sketching something just as simple as a line segment so what you're allowed to do is you can pick any point out in space and then you can choose what orientation you want this line segment to go so right off the bat if I just start sketching at 0 0 my endpoint is going in all three directions x y&z I have no real control over where it's going to end up unless I utilize some of the sections and features in the gizmo so for example if I highlight and select this plane here it's going to confine my line segment to the XY plane so now I'm only worried about two directions same thing if I do here on the bottom plane it's going to confine it to the X and z direction or x and z plane so you can choose that plane and it will stay in that planar orientation now you can just look flat to it and it's just like you're sketching in a normal 2d sketch that you're used to so you can change what plain direction at any time so I'm gonna sketch out just a few line segments here alright so at this point I'm going to now change my orientation and confine it to the X Z plane direction come on just a little bit step it over maybe down to here and then change again go to X and water sorry y and z and then X and Z and go back to Y and Z again and you can dimension each one of these segments relative to that plane orientation using the dimension command and what you'll see is the result of a 3d sketch this can be used for laying out piping tubing wiring handrails anything of that nature so that's really what throws everybody when we first come into the 3d sketch environment is the gizmo and how to use it you can even start using the XY and z axis or vector directions to layout your start point you don't have to start at zero what if you need to start a certain amount away from zero in X and a certain amount up from zero and Y you can use that box to do this so maybe we start a quarter-inch over an X and an eighth of an inch up in Y Z is zero so that's where that start point is it moves the gizmo to that location so try not to be afraid of the 3d sketch environment it can be a very handy tool especially when you come in to do something like framing so jumping back to this we're in the 3d sketch mode in mode inside of this part and I'm need to reference pieces of geometry in here just like you have project geometry in a 2d sketch in here we have include geometry and it creates that reference point for us so I'm going to reference each one of the corner points of my 2d sketch of my frame and then I'm just going to draw my line segments so coming down from one of them choosing an orientation making sure it's 90 degrees and I'll bring this one down not worried about the dimension just yet and I want to restart this and do the same thing on all four leg corners once I have them all drawn I can then go back and utilize constraints to lock in the relationships so I'm gonna select each one of them or select all of them and then I'll just set them to be equal with each other and then I'll throw a dimension down so this is going to be 84 inches long now I need to put in some cross members just to give this some rigidity on the design same thing here I'll just go from midpoint to midpoint restart my line segment and then midpoint again to this midpoint now when I get into the frame generator itself it's going to see these two segments here as continuous runs and I'm not going to have the flexibility I need to do proper frame notching so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take one of these line segments and I'm just gonna split it up so luckily we have the split command in the 3d sketch environment so now I've broken that up into two separate segments I can now use this as my base model for my framing so all you have to do is you launch a standard assembly or weldment either one you want to work with is fine depends on what you're going to do if you're going to apply weld or not once you're in the assembly mode you're going to place the skeleton component then you use your standard assembly workflow to get the proper orientation place it grounded at the origin and of course save your assembly once the assembly saved on the design ribbon you have a frame panel this is where all of the frame generator interaction is going to come from and again it pulls from the content center so if I just bounce in there real quick to show you what we're going to be pulling from standard content center you have a structural shapes category under there you have angles see channels I beams bar stock square tubing tee shapes it's pulling from each one of these categories for the frame generator and again you can create your own custom category in here in a writable library and publish your own custom shapes to that so I'll start out with inserting the frame the frame generator brings up this dialog that looks pretty busy but it's pretty simple on the workflow you're going to be determining what's standard you're going to conform to ANSI for us we're going to keep it easy and then what family you're going to be working with so going all the way to the top here we've got flat bar steel then we go into rectangular tubing square bar stock square tubing rectangular tubing different standards of square tubing round tubing eyebeams eight beams s beams then you get back into piping and you've got different categories for different standards you've got metric and inches so what I'll be working in is the S shape or the S beam then you choose your size so for this I'll just use a three by five then you can optionally you're not required to but optionally you can pick a material and then a material finish the rest of the dialog box deals with the actual placement and control of the member itself so looking across the bottom you've got the different abilities or different ways you can select to place a frame member the default method is to insert a frame member on a sketch line or an edge same thing seen by the software the other method is to say point one and point two wherever those points are it'll put a frame between those two points or connecting with those points then across the very bottom you've got different options for being prompted for the file name of the member because it's going to create an actual part just like you're placing a part out of the kind of bolt out of the content center it's creating an actual bolt so it's going to prompt you for the filename and location you can have it choose to get the part number and material and everything from the content sooner if you wish and then you can choose what sketch lines you want it to see access to by default it's going to see solid sketch lines Center lines and construction lines but you can filter that out to where it only sees one or two so I'm going to select my four vertical legs here just with a crossing window and then I will look at the orientation section the way this works the little target that you see in the dialog that represents your sketch line so if I look flat to this and come up here and look at my preview you'll notice the S beam or the i-beam is centered on my sketch line so if I change my orientation and put it at one of the corners for example it changes to relocate it at that corner so you might look at this say well wait a minute that doesn't match the preview okay it will if I flip it around and upside down this is where can get a little bit confusing sometimes oh I need to go to the other way can give just a little bit confusing if you're looking at the wrong side at the wrong end and the wrong orientation it's going to depend on where you pick the sketch line to determine which is the top end which is the bottom end so it may not match your preview orientation me personally I usually don't worry about it because you can come back later and you can change that orientation a lot of times I will just Center everything and then come back and move each individual piece the way I needed to move because right now if I want this to go to the inside picking the inside corner of it now I can offset it inside if I want to so if we look at this sketch size 156 by 104 let's say that's the overall size of our platform we cannot exceed that we're under a space requirement so if that's our overall size and we're gonna wrap the top of this in eighth inch thick sheet metal about 12 inches wide it's going to be just a sheet metal skirt okay in order to do that we need to move this i-beam in just a little bit right it can't be on the very edge because then we'll exceed the overall footprint so that's what these to offset boxes are for that allow you to control the distance offset inside or outside the distance can be positive or negative so you can control that gap so this gives us our gap space for the one inch or eighth inch thick sheet metal skirt that we're going to be putting on this for simplicity sake on the edits that are coming gonna come later I'll just set this back to zero you also have control to rotate these pieces now the way this is currently set up it's going to rotate each and every one of them or offset each and every one of them this is one of the reasons I like to just apply them centered and then come back later and change them so that's probably the workflow I'm going to use when I click OK you'll see I'm prompted with a sub-assembly name so this works just like the bolted connection generator you place a bolt washer another washer and a nut and it's going to create a sub assembly within your top-level assembly the same logic applies here you're specifying the sub assembly the path to that sub and then the skeletal frame component part name and path for that when I say okay then it's going to prompt me for the file names and the paths for each one of these members even though they're the same size the same length of I beam or s beam it's going to make each of them a brand new piece part ok it's going to reuse the data from the content center and just give them a new name so for this one I'm going to say each one of them and start the sequence over at one so this one will be Oh 2 and the next one Oh 3 and so forth the reason it does this is because of the edits that you're going to do to the components of the frame members afterwards are going to be unique so if you reused the same frame member then the edits are going to be on all of them and it may not be the right edit for each one of them so I'll go ahead and create those got the start of my platform going here the next thing I need to do is come in and change orientation right so I've got them all centered I want to change these members and relocate them that's where the change command comes in you're able to select multiples to change multiple pieces at once or you can just work one off so for this one I'll change the orientation to the proper corner location and I'm going to offset it in for that sheet metal and make sure I have my gaps correct all right one of them's going the wrong distance so just negative that apply that and I'll keep making changes to the rest of the pieces to get them to the proper orientation as well same thing putting in the sheetmetal offsets and again both of these will be negative ok that's actually the only time I'm going to worry with for now for times sake need to insert a few more frames so I'm gonna insert my cross members down here at the bottom it's gonna be three pieces because again I split that one cross member line keeping all of the same options same material same size you can change them if you want the software is not going to resist that you can mix and match any frame shape and any frame size again it's going to create three unique parts and when I say unique they are unique you can open them individually and make edits to them that's going to be very apparent with what I'm about to show you when we zoom in and we look at how these frame members are going together this one back here is kind of driving through one of the legs okay that's not going to work we got to cut it down and match it up to do that we have a tool called knotch now this is what I was referring to that Revit structure does automatically with Revit structure you run a cope and it will automatically cope and then ask for mechanisms on how to secure this connection with inventor it keeps everything small they're assuming you're going to weld pretty much everything in here that's what we're doing with Maschine framing or welding 99% of it so you're not prompted with any kind of bolted connection or fastener connection or reinforcement connection the way the knotch command works you choose the blue part is what's going to get cut or modified and then the yellow component is what it cuts into or cuts to match that shape so I'll go ahead and say ok here and when I say ok I don't look like anything changed hey you still got that piece sticking out there well it did notch it it did cut it because you'll notice there's no preview lines going through the vertical beam all of these members they are standalone parts remember I said that a few minutes ago that's very handy because you can open these individual pieces and take a look to see what changes have been made to it and when we come in on this end point down here you'll notice it has completely notched out and cut out the shape of that i-beam that this is running into so what do we do about this extra leftover material okay it's real easy to take care of at the part level you can use something like the delete face command void option choose that lump of material and it's gone it's out of the way save my part instantly go back update my assembly you'll notice the leftover material is gone now the other thing that you might need to compensate for in here if you're going to weld this together you probably need a little bit of a gap between these phases so again this is why it's an advantage that these pieces are standalone pieces you can take these pieces right now these phases there are no gaps between these phases you can take this piece open it back up and you can offset these phases so that you can mimic or create a weld gap so for that I'm going to use the thickened and offset command just picking each one of these phases to offset them and instead of offsetting them outward I'll offset them inward for an eighth inch gap save my part close it update on my symbol and you'll see there's a gap already in there so this is why you get that ability to have them as standalone parts I'm going to insert the rest of the frame members up here at the top just picking my sketch lines you can window to select sketch lines or select individuals I'm still gonna stick with the state the same shape for now and in just a few seconds you get all of your frame members again we got some cleanup we got to do on these so looking at the corners we've got a situation where okay well I need to offset each one of these in we can do that not a problem just change change that member change the offset area same thing to this one change the orientation and continue to do that all the way around it might be a little bit more time-intensive to do it this way but my personal preference is I get the flexibility of how I want to handle each frame member after I get them laid out on the skeleton okay so looking down here at this in connection we got a nice little conglomeration of stuff going on first off let's start out by mitering the two top pieces of the platform so with the miter control you're mitering two pieces but you do have more control than what you have in the notch in the mitre you are capable of specifying a weld gap I defaults to zero but you can go in and specify whatever you need you also have control to specify that the mitre is clean cut on both or one gets cut and the other one just gets angled basically a one-off mater so I'm choosing a symmetric mitre it miters both pieces perfectly and puts in that weld gap that I had so how do we handle this guy here do we do another notch on the vertical leg no you don't have to you could but it's an extra step to go in there and delete this extra bit of material that you don't need so for something like this you can use the trim extend command so the way this works is you're choosing multiple pieces if you want to to cut them all at once the knotch command is one at a time you can cut one frame to match this cut one frame to match this the trim and extend it allows you to pick multiple things to cut it once so all I really need to do is shorten this guy right so I'm just gonna pick the vertical leg here and I'll actually pick all of the vertical legs since they're all going to be cut the same that's going to be my blue selection the piece is going to be modified and then I choose the face that I want to shorten them down to or to lengthen them up too so that's going to be the bottom side of the i-beam here say okay and it shortens all four pieces now if you'll notice in the tree as you're making these edits these pieces get all of these end treatments added underneath whatever modifications you've done to it gets added down here almost like a feature that was done to it you can change to mix-and-match shapes change and mix and match size so if I want to change from an i-beam top shape to maybe something like a rectangular tube shape change to a different size tube and will maybe go up to a say 4 by 2 same thing here with the frame members you can notch out to match up shapes so if I notch out the rectangular tubing to match up with the i-beam or if I shorten I can also lengthen and shorten the the down side to this on the trim and extend if I'm trimming the rectangular tubing to the inside face or the back face will say the back face here at the top it's going to shorten the tube too much okay that's that's not going to work out so I will have to use something like a notch for this but in this situation here do I necessarily need these areas of the rectangular tube up top no again that's where it's handy because these are standalone pieces that you can open you can make your edits onto these standalone pieces so for something like this I may come in and create some extrusions and cut away that material or just use a work plane and split it and break off those pieces whatever way works that way I don't get that extra material left over on the top of the bottom if you're working with a part as your base ok so if we got a machine base again this is just a solid part it's just got the right footprint size you know feet by feet if we're working with this as our base the workflow is the same you're going to start with your assembly you're gonna place that machine footprint proper orientation and location again saving your assembly because it's going to prompt you if you don't anyways then on the design ribbon you start inserting your framing when you're working in a situation like this you've got the ability to make rounded corners it will round that beam whether you can bend it like that or not is another story but it will round that beam for you and you can also merge those pieces into one without that it's going to break it up into three individual pieces but with the merge enabled it's gonna be one continuous piece that it assumes you're going to bend it out in the shop to match it up so when you're doing something like this you want to take that source part that source component and you want to change the bill material structure of that source component and I'll show you why in a second so just in a few seconds you get all the frame members inserted into the into the assembly you don't need the base component anymore right you don't need to see that you just need to see the framing so yeah you can take and you can turn off visibility of it that that's one way to get it out of the picture the problem is when you look at your eye properties on your assembly that base component is still playing into these eye properties it's having an effect on your mass on your volume your center of gravity your inertia you don't want that to happen so what you can do is in the assembly or even in the bill material properties of the part you can change the bill material assignment of that skeletal component part of that base of that base component instead of being a normal BOM structure change it to a reference a lot of people don't realize that reference parts anytime an item is identified as reference it's mass is not calculated when it's in an assembly it's volume is not calculated it's center of gravity has no influence over the top level assembly so now your eye properties will adjust to only reflect the actual frame members and this is also a good time to note on the bill material itself the information that you get out of this you're given the overall length when you might or something or when you cut something the length adjusts based on that mater or based on that cut so your cut length here is going to be exact any kind of offsets that you do gap in or gap out for a weld it's going to compensate for those as well so the next thing to look at is the custom shape as we mentioned everybody is familiar with the ore hopefully everyone is familiar with the 80/20 shape has gained a lot of popularity in the last 10-15 years so we're seeing more and more odd shapes not just this but other shapes entering into the market as well those are not in the standard content center so you have to create those shapes and get them in there once they're in there you can use them all day long just like a regular eye beam see channel bar stock here's the process the basic process to get to that step one you are going to have to have a writable library you'll know if you have that if you look at your project manager on your active project in the lower right hand corner you'll see an icon labeled configure content center libraries when you launch this it'll show you all of the different libraries you have associated to your project file one of those should be something like a my library this is the default stock out-of-the-box library that gets created but you can create a library and name it whatever you want to name it it just has to be a readwrite library without that none of this is gonna work once you have that set up you've got your component sketched out you got your component modeled on the manage ribbon on the author panel you'll see it a pull down for authoring components to the content center of authoring tube and pipe shapes for the tubing type engine or structural shapes for frame generators so that's what we're going to utilize brings up a handy little utility you can go in and choose your category you can add it to an existing category or you can use the content center editor and create your own category so I've got an 80/20 category I've already created it recognises the shape it recognizes a lot of the feature the really the only thing it really needs is some parameter mapping the base length you need to have a parameter that's already named or set up to represent the base length so I just called mine length bare-minimum that's all you need right there and you're ready to rock on to the next stage you can put in other things like coefficients here the placement moment of inertia height width things like that pick and choose kind of play around with this whatever is gonna be beneficial to you guys take a couple of test parts and try it out and see how you're gonna like and see what properties you're gonna need in there that's my best advice published now brings up the author dialog boxes choosing what library you're going to publish this to you can have multiple rideable libraries set up you're not limited to just one then you get into the actual category assignment where you're gonna place this we're gonna throw it in the 80/20 category again it's just a review of your properties if you need to add any more or map out anymore you can do that at this stage and then what columns you want to be present in here part number material pretty standard stuff length is standard if you want to tweak more of this once it gets into the content center then you're going to need to add some of the more critical information like the height of the profile the width of the profile or any other critical areas Bend radius or some kind of critical fit dimension that's in there you're going to have to add those parameters in the mapping so I step into the next part of it you're able to specify the family name a basic description of the family as it's going to appear in the content center what standard it's going to adhere to this is pretty critical when you start filtering out the content center stuff if you don't have a standard specified for a component you've published it's going to disappear with every single standard that you filter out so you want to assign it to whatever standard governs it so when you look at the ANSI that's all you're seeing and you have your custom custom components show up what standard did it may adhere to if any one manufacturer standard revision all of this is pretty well optional but I would definitely enforce and reiterate standard organization you definitely wanna specify that so when you filter the content center you see the components you want to see when I jump into the next you get a preview of the thumbnail image and publish it publishes already done so how well does this work let's jump back to this guy and we'll just delete that assembly and start over so turn off the visibility or turn the visibility that back on go back to my frame generator engine insert a frame there's my ANSI standard there's my different shapes you can also pull in different types of shape configurations to match so like if you open up from the content center open up your 80/20 you can mix and match that 80/20 even though it's a custom shape you can mix and match it with any of the other standard shapes we will run into a footnote of I've seen two instances where a custom shape did not want to miter correctly and it's just because it was so exotic it's a shape I've never even seen it was so exotic it just would not miter properly that was a couple years ago Autodesk may have fixed it I haven't tested that and I think with that that's going to conclude and we're going to open it up for questions at this time so Kevin how's the question panel looking it's been pretty quiet been had had a couple of questions about how very similar identical parts are grouped together with regard to parts less cutlass I think I've answered those and if you can look at at my answers you can you can kind of expand on that if you'd like to there hasn't anybody else have any any questions that that they'd like answered you okay so you're talking about the one would each of those legs have an individual line item in the cut list yeah yeah they'll each appear as an individual line item but with BOM editing you can roll them into one line item if you want to in the assembly also if you do roll them up and then you come back after you do that and you make an edit like I did where I used delete face and I removed a voided material it's going to take that one item out of that line item because the length property just changed so it looks like a couple of different things when it rolls them up it's probably going to take that one item you make the edit too if the length changes any it's going to pull it out of that roll-up and it'll exist as its own standalone item and next question is a link to the recording and yes there will be yes actually I believe that is posted on our website within a few days is that correct yes it will be and we also will email anyone who attended or registered for the webcast probably tomorrow with a link for the recording good can the part names be changed to follow a part numbering scheme set up with vault workgroup instead of the default part numbering the part number is pulled from the content center so whatever you have listed there it's going to follow the at sequential setup now once you get this interval you can renumber parts from there as we place it there's no way they don't have it in the software to pull a cue or reference into a vault table to say get your part number from here it has to be mapped into the con into the content center in the fashion you need it it might be totally off time if I have a 12 gauge round perforated panel and need it to be formed into a C panel that is something I can achieve with 3d sketch or is that something I do in sheet metal ah I'm gonna say yes I can see a possible way of doing that in both environments depends on what output you're you're actually looking for if you're looking for a flat pattern then obviously you want to stick with the sheet metal but if you're just looking for the form yeah you could do that with 3d sketching with the 3d sketch environment I have seen people build surfaces and just a series of surfaces on surfaces and surfaces and lofted surfaces for bins and radiuses and things like that and then they end up converting those into thickened faces and they get a solid so you got a lot of flexibility when you're working with 3d sketching oh can you show the delete face void segment again when you removed the untrimmed portion yeah actually I can show that real quick the way that works is you you have to have a couple of things in in play here so let me get this out of the way when you're doing a delete face and find my component now here we go let me get another one here I think that one yeah so if I come in here and I notch out in order to get that set up so I'm gonna open this component the reason the delete face works so well in this particular situation you'll notice that one side of this has absolutely no connection whatsoever to the other side there's no faces touching or anything like that in that situation when you use delete face you can select the void option it's looking for a lump or a massive material that's floating out in space and not connected to anything in that case it works it sees all of that is one massive lump and gets rid of it in the situation where sometimes maybe these faces are just touching by definition there are two different faces but they're still touching there's just a little tiny edge between them in that situation it can be a little time-consuming but you can use the default delete face option you just got to pick every single little face that's on this big lump of material out here and you can't miss any of them because if you do it's gonna mess you up you got to pick every single one of those faces and then choose the heal option what that will do is it will try to delete all of those faces and either he lit up by patching it with material or just removing those definitions and keeping your piece as a solid you've got to be real careful with heal because it can destroy or delete geometry that you actually needed but as long as there's no contact between them there's a gap between them the lump option should work just fine Gavin you got any others let's see any clues got a couple of questions about the 3d models sketches basically how you how you initiate the command the the legs that you were drawing at the beginning essentially I think Eddie if that's if that's what what you were talking about the 3d sketch is initialized using the same pull down where the 2d sketch command is so you've got two different icons there you have a 2d sketch icon and then just underneath that you have a 3d sketch icon a lot of people don't even realize the 3d sketch is there but there is a pull down arrow to the right of the 2d sketch icon and you'll see 3d sketch listed underneath fair warning when you go into one it remembers what you were just in and it keeps it there until you switch to another one so if you start out with a 3d sketch 3d sketch icon is going to be the default icon as long as you have inventor open in that part file and does the bomb take care of being beam links after delete faces initiated and I do believe that you show that that that does indeed happen I no there were way past I mean 2016 and earlier we had some little issues with with the bill of material not updating but I think that's pretty well been resolved with later releases yeah the base length property was not updating and I think that was fixed in 2017 update to if I remember correctly one of those updates update one didn't get it is either update 2 or update 3 that got it in 17 we're now it reflects those changes mm-hmm can the frame be imported into a Revit family for further further modeling I believe those imports are in correct me if I'm wrong kindred are those imports going from inventor to Revit would be what we would call dumb solids are they not they're gonna go in there as dumb solids but in Revit if they come in it depends on how you get them out of inventor if you use BIM exchange you can export as an ad SK file which is going to give you some mapping capabilities for connections and things like that it's typically used for like if you make an HVAC unit and you need to map out hot water supply cold water drainage electrical in things like that that's gonna give you an ATS K file there's also a way of just exporting this the solid or the material out as an RFA and when that's opened up in rivets my understanding it comes in as a rivet family to where you can do configurations on it for changing size and changing lengths like that some of the properties will come in but not the features that were used to create it so a mitered beam it will come in mitered but you won't have the miter feature there to delete it or change it you'll have things like the length and and the base sketch representation that's my understanding of it I've never actually seen it but that's what I've been told this one 3d sketch mainly used for frame generator water other cases the 3d sketch is useful for Oh no it is not just for the frame generator 3d sketch is incredibly beneficial and powerful when you are working with the cable and wire harness utility and inventor and the tube and pipe routing utility the inventor if you're doing any kind of advanced surface modeling especially when you're working with lofted shapes we've got a customer up in the northern states they do a lot of work with razor companies like Gillette the handheld electric razors those freeform very ergonomic shapes they do a lot of surfacing to get those shapes modeled in inventor and they're doing a lot of 3d sketches for those keeping things simple I mean probably 80% of the time most people are going to be ok with a 2d sketch but when you get into some of the special knit fit niche fits like cable and wire harness to impact generation or advance shape definition 3d sketches is going to be beneficial there yeah and that looks like I don't see any more coming even at this point a lot of compliments a very good presentation and indeed it was I even picked up a few things myself and I've used frame generator for a very long time well thank you everybody for attending I hope everybody enjoyed it and got some useful information out of it luckily it was recorded so you can watch it again if in case you missed anything if you run across something that doesn't make sense or you need some help by all means give us a call we are happy to help out absolutely yes thanks kindred this will conclude our broadcast if you do think of additional questions you can just reply to that confirmation or reminder email you've received from GoToWebinar will we will receive those and get those to kindred or whoever need you need to answer your questions once again if you could take a few moments to answer the short survey we would appreciate it we'll just automatically pop up as we close today thanks for attending and have a great day everybody

Channel: Hagerman & Company, Inc.

Views: 31,524

Rating: 4.9163179 out of 5

Keywords: inventor's frame, general 3d sketching workflow, bom display of framing structures, custom fram member shapes, 3d sketching, framing support, frame generator, framing to sketch geometry, frame generator support

Id: bvP0ykJjTfE

Length: 60min 57sec (3657 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2018