Autodesk Inventor -- Using Custom Sections with Frame Generator

odd cast is now starting all attendees are in listen-only mode hello everyone and thank you for attending today's webcast Autodesk Inventor using custom sections with frame generator presented by force shed solutions engineer with Hagerman a company we also have Gary bridge arrow CAD Training Manager with Hagerman on the line to assist with your questions this presentation is being broadcasted and listen-only mode you can ask questions by typing them into the question section of the GoToWebinar control panel on the side of your screen and Gary will address your questions throughout the presentation at the end of the broadcast when you exit GoToWebinar you'll be prompted to fill out a short three question survey we ask that you take a few moments to provide us with your feedback also all attendees will receive a certificate of attendance and a link to the recording of this presentation for us whenever you're ready you may begin all right thanks Brianna and thanks everyone for attending this morning I hope you find this informative just a bit of review for what Bernina mentioned wall I'll get to that in a second I guess we should talk about our agenda we're gonna be talking this morning about using custom shapes and custom cross sections with frame generator and manner frame generator is really a great tool if you've got to do any sort of framework like table frames or guards things like that but there are a lot of shapes in the world that aren't in the default libraries so it's important that you know if you're going to use foreigner that you know how to add your own sections so that's we're gonna discuss this morning we're gonna talk about creating custom sections then publishing those to the content center I'll do a quick review of the frame generated functionality for those of you who aren't very familiar with it we'll discuss modifying the content center which I find is something that if you're going to use the content center and then you absolutely need to know how to do it but many people don't or they're just not comfortable with it so we're going to talk about that and at the very end we'll have a short review of the inventor's frame analysis functionality that's built into a better professional so if you need to do any sort of virtual testing of your framework before you build it and Leonard can help you with that and then we'll have some time for dedicated question and answer at the end of the presentation so he says we go feel free to ask questions via the questions pane at any time Gary may answer those questions as we go via text in the in the question in the answer pane itself I'll be keeping an eye on them to the so if a pertinent question comes up I may address that as we go through the presentation and also uh this presentation is being recorded so you can watch it again later or share it with your colleagues here in some time in the next few days it will be available on our webcast on demand page on our website if you've never been to this page it really is a great resource we have a ton of previous webcasts all available here data management AC manufacturing just a huge list tons and tons of great content so if you've got a few minutes you might check that out and see if any of the topics apply to something you need to learn about so with that we'll get started with presentation we're going to start out with a discussion of how to create custom sections there are lots of ways you can do it there are kind of good ways and and I want to say bad ways but maybe less productive ways to do it we're going to cover things like proper parameter use making sure that you name your parameters appropriately I'll show you how to author a section we'll discuss special NOC profiles which for more complex sessions can be important and then mapping their parameters so that both your frame generator use of that section and maybe in the frame analysis environment are both successful so one of the most important elements of authoring a custom section will be to use parameters intelligently they need to have appropriate names so that it's easier for you later on in the authoring process to specify what's what's what some of the key parameters you're gonna need for any section will be a height and a width a thickness if the section is thin walled and then one that's absolutely required is going to be the length ultimately what's going to be the length of the member when it gets either used in frame generator or placed manually from the content center when it comes to authoring you're actually almost always going to want to create an eye part out of the section before you offer it that's going to make it easier to use straight out of the content center and it's also going to give you an opportunity to provide some additional like property information upfront if the section is something it's going to be variable size let's say for example you want to use square aluminum tubing I don't think there's actually a library that comes with the inventor software that includes that you can build the different sizes of aluminum tube into the same contents and her family and use it just like you would any of the the standard shapes you're gonna want to create an eye part out of that and you know add at least a few sizes that you know you're going to use maybe right into the eye part and then later on you can add additional sizes and the content center will be covering that a bit later so once you've got to meet in the sorry part then you would go into the structural shape authoring tool which is where you supply all the information needed to use this shape with the frame generator so it's base point the category that it belongs to which is going to determine what what parameters are associated with it of course the basic version what the shape is but also a special knotch profile now the natural used specifically with the knotch end treatment which if you're not familiar with that we'll discuss that in a little bit but ultimately it's where you're cutting a shape from one member as relief almost like a like coping against another member by default it's gonna cut line to line the exact shape of the member so you can see you know in this picture here on the left say we're using a piece of extruded aluminum the cutout is extremely complex and odds are you don't really need that shape cut out if it's just maybe a pocket for this to sit in on a beam ideally you'd want to cut out maybe just more of a rectangular shape the special notch profile allows you to do that not just for that but even if it's as simple if you're the member you're coping you're cutting out to cope against even if it's simple and winter still doesn't line the line so if you're going to do welding you're gonna wall this together you may need some additional clearance in there the special notch profile would allow you to introduce that clearance so they can be very useful and finally you would do your parameter mapping this is gonna make sure especially that the frame analysis module will work most of our structural shaped categories have in Condon Center have all of these special parameters built in you don't necessarily need to fill out all of these when we get into the frame analysis module I'll show you that it does calculate the vast majority of them but especially if if the shape you've drawn is maybe simplified you may need to I guess override the whatever inventor might calculate with these values and so you'll ultimately need parameters either model parameters or columns in your iPart table that's why it can be important to use to convert this thing into an eye part even if there's only a single size because you'll want to map eye part table columns to these various category parameters so let's take a look at how we would actually go through this process now I I decided to use for this example some extruded aluminum shapes this is something that when I was doing machine design every day I used a lot of 80/20 components so it's just a T slotted aluminum you know similar to unis threat or item is a is another common you know shape just like this and they have lots of different cross sections this is something I downloaded straight from the 80/20 website it's the 45 series family and I can use this part to start with but to create my shape now I ultimately need some parameters to specify some of the you know to map to some of the category parameters the model from 80/20 is just a sketch they're actually no dimensions so I am going to put in a few parameters here we're gonna call this the width and we'll just make sure let's keep it at 90 I could go in and dimension every little bit of this but there's so much geometry we need you know several hundred constraints or dimensions and as long as we don't change these values then we're in good shape so this is the height I'll go ahead and put a thickness in here and you can ultimately call these parameters whatever you bike I'm just using height and width and thickness because that's going to be most analogous to the category parameters that I need to specify and there's already an extruded feature here so I'm just going to modify that so if you never if you've never done this use this process to name a parameter for it just just to know you can type in the name and then equals and then whatever value and that can be easier especially if it's a model that someone else created then going to your parameters page and trying to figure out what D 0 is and D 1 and D 2 you know you can go right there on the while you're editing and and give them appropriate names okay so I've got a few parameters to work with at this point I think I'll create it an eye part out of it even though this is just a single size I'm not going to try to get fancy with this and include all of the sizes and the different geometry into one ultimately I could if I got really fancy I think with with you know the geometry but but in this case you know I'm not going to I'm not going to try to bother with it so one of the things I'm going to do the width the height and the thickness ultimately are not going to change but the length of this is going to be variable and if I create a custom parameter column out of the length when I then publish this to the content center it's going to make it easier for me to use even in the absence of frame generator so if I don't want to use frame generator I just want to have this custom section in my library to put down one by one and type in a length I can do that I'm also going to set the width and the height as key columns this is going to make it easier for me to select when I actually use the frame generator and we'll talk a little bit more about that later so I have a single row here I that's all I needed for this case you know you can always put in it might be a good idea also to put in some things like a stock number and maybe a part number well I guess the part numbers already there so that if you want this information to come out on to the parts when their place safer builds the material that you have that already in place like description and stock number might be good right so the description might be you know 45 90 series 80 20 extruded aluminum and then maybe you know whatever this is 80/20 - 45 90 so now we have an eye part with a single row and that's just gonna make it easier for when we get author now if you've never done this before it might be kind of hard to find the tool it's just a little honestly button up here called structural shape and you'll notice we have various authoring tools depending on the edition of inventor that you have you know we could author components for use in the tube and pipe environment or for the wire harness environment and then this case we're looking for structural shape authoring you always start by selecting the category that this is going to go into because we have some predefined categories for our steel shapes like angles and channels and i-beams I'm just going to put it in other for now you can ultimately add your own categories to the library we'll talk about that just shortly when we get into modifying the content center it's going to select the base extrusion by default it's going to select the origin of the part as the default base point so that means when you create your own sections you're absolutely going to want to create the geometry around the origin of the part and one thing I forgot to do in the original sketch was create geometry for if not profile because I don't want if I if I cut out a notch with this I don't want you know this complex shape cut out so I'm gonna go back into my sketch and I'm just gonna create a center point rectangle right on the middle right right there from the center and we'll give a little bit of clearance here too so we'll do like the width plus one millimeter and the height plus one millimeter on the outside then we'll round the corners off so this is going to be the shape that ultimately gets cut out now you notice I'm making this on the same sketch as the shape it needs to be in the same in your base sketch with the rest of the geometry so now when I offer this shape I choose a knotch profile I'm ultimately you're picking and this is gonna be they're gonna be several several clicks involved here because there's so many different regions and the geometry is pretty complex and so it hesitates a little bit my pick but this is just like if you were picking a region for extrusion and you can see the preview is going to show here's what it's going to here's what the cutout is going to look like I just want just a nice simple rectangle with you know rounded corners so if I use the notch command this is going to be the shape that it cuts out so the last step here is to map the parameters the table columns you see here this is going to be where you can pick from your iPart table so we had length we had and then shape height was our height and so because I've named these parameters I can quickly and easily set those I'm not going to bother setting any of the other parameters just yet I could if I wanted to inventor will figure out most of these when necessary especially like in the frame analysis environment and just like that the part has been authored now I personally like to take this like this shape that I made now it's ready to be put in the content center I like to save this and maybe even put it into my vault at this point so that if I ever need to get back to life I needed to completely republish this part I could so we'll do 4590 with authoring that way I just have it handy if I need to get back to an ending point so you can see it's pretty straightforward if I had multiple sizes to this part like that the width or the height or the thickness needed to vary I would just add additional rows to the iPart table to accommodate those sizes modify the values and then eventually when I publish this to the content center it's going to extract that table information into the family table of the content center right so the next step in this process is publishing it to the content center so some key elements to this you're going to need custom contents in our library you're going to have to confirm the category and parameter mapping because we authored the part that's going to mostly be done for us in this case you'll need to specify key parameters and you'll need to fill out some information about the family like the standard organization and a description of the name so of course the first step to publishing anything to the content center is you must have a custom library defined now with a default installation if you don't uncheck any boxes or make any changes to the configuration during Advent or installation your inventor will be set up to use the desktop content libraries these are just sort of databases that sit by default on your computer all of the standard libraries are there and you have one custom library created called my library now if you're using vault you also have the option to have those libraries hosted on your vault server so we take a look here in our application options inside and enter on our content center tab this is where you indicate whether you're using inventor desktop content or your Autodesk vault server now as far as the defining what content center libraries are available to you that is controlled by your project file so if we go to our projects dialog I'm working in my vault project currently so you notice I can work in a vault you know as much as I want I don't have to use the vault for my content libraries in larger groups I like the idea of the using the vault to manage the content because everyone uses the same libraries that way and they're always just available if you're in a smaller group or if you don't need to share your customizations amongst other people or maybe if you if you travel a lot and work within there while you're traveling you may want to go the desktop content route because you may not have a connection to your vault while you're traveling or if you're connected via VPN in a hotel room like I often am the connection be really slow and it can get a bit frustrating to use inventor so whichever route you go you've specified the libraries that are available to you via your project file now your project file has to be read only or read right I'm sorry mine currently is not checked out to me so if you're in a vault environment and you need to modify this kind of thing you will need permission to check out your vault project file and this frequently happens as well inventor likes to lock down at that project file I'm doing all this on purpose so that you can see what you might run into if you have to do this yourself right so now that this is rewrite I can go and look at my content library configuration and this is gonna tell me right now I'm using my inventor desktop content this is also an easy way to find where the libraries are stored and this is the default location in your program data folder you can see I have some of the libraries available but not all and I do have a lead write library available so all of the default libraries are read-only you're not allowed to modify those directly now if I'm using a content I mean if I'm using desktop content I should say this is how I would create a new library is through this configure libraries press the button give it a name so my custom library and just like that we have a new library to which we could add that's if you're using desktop comes in if you're using the vault you have to have access to well I say that but you have to have at least you at least have to have permission to create contents in our libraries on your vault server right so if you say I'm using the vault for my content we're gonna see a slightly different look here so now that I'm using my vault server you can see I actually don't have any libraries at all on my server and if you notice I don't have the ability to create a new library if I'm using vault here to do that you have to use your data management server console so this is an application that's on this server and to create a new readwrite library you just right click on your light you log into your console right click create library and that goes through the process of making the database on the server and you know making it available now with that library available could see I could put it into use and now I would have one on my vault server so it's a slightly different process but ultimately that is the first step of customizing your content centers you have to make sure that you have a lead write library available right so once you've got a library there then you can actually get to the publishing part so you start out by choosing the category that you want to publish the part into and mapping your parameters now if you have use of the structural shape authoring this parts easy it just all those choices are actually made for you you only want to specify your key parameters now for structural shapes like this length is always going to be one of them and you always need at least one other parameter even if your part is just a single size you're going to want to pick one more parameter at least to define when you use in the user interface so that you know what you're picking your choose the height or the width usually if your shape is variable in size you're gonna want to pick enough key parameters so that you can completely define a specific row of the table so if you have variable you know width and height and thickness let's say if you have aluminum two let's say you have a two by two by you know quarter inch thick and a two by two by 3/8 inch thick you need to have the thickness and at least one of the other two parameters as key parameters so you could correctly indicate I want this version of the tube at this wall thickness and then finally it would pick a standards organization and the description and the name of it the standard organization is how you're ultimately going to easily locate this custom shape that you're making so what I like to do even if it's a standard like that there's actually a standard like ANSI or den I like to provide a custom name so that I can very easily find my custom shapes and I'll show you that here in just a second so let's go back to the part that I just author to put this into the content center once it's been authored I go to my contents in her tab or panel I should say and just press publish part now I have to choose the library to which I want to publish will use my library now because I authored this the category is already selected for me I could choose another category here if I wanted to but then I might have to adjust my parameter mapping on the next page this is the exact same screen that I saw when I was offering so I've already done the parameter mapping if this was a part you didn't author and you were just putting it in your content center you know you would just you would do the mapping at this point now the key columns that I had added in my eye part table get automatically included I'm going to make sure and put the length in there as a key column as well the order you see here is just the order in which they're going to be in the UI if you were to place it manually now in this case because I only had one row in my table the file name column is not going to because I've got a custom length here the file name of the part when it gets placed isn't necessarily going to be unique we'll talk more about this when I get into modifying the content center but if I plan to use this part aside from the frame generator I may want to go and modify the family table so that the file name when I when I place it always comes out to be unique well we'll talk more about that in just a bit so this is basically the last page the family name and the description you see the description came out from the description column of my art table now stand organization you can see here it's got a few defaults I can actually type anything in this field that I want and it's debatably basically gonna add a new standard organization to this list so I could call it 8020 custom for example and that'll be a new standard organization I'm just gonna pick 8020 because I want to keep all my 8020 sections together now the rest of these you could choose to you know fill out or not and then the last page is just the thumbnail this is what you're going to see in the content center UI I do see question came in that's pretty relevant right now the why would you map I think meaning when you published the part why would you map parameters some of these parameters are necessary for the frame analysis environment to work so if you needed custom say if the let's say I was drawing this shape but I didn't want to make it so complex I could simplify this by maybe just putting in just a circle as opposed to this complex shape but then the moment of inertia and section area and whatnot that inventor would calculate when I'm using the frame analysis module wouldn't be correct so I may need to override that by providing the actual you know mechanical properties of the section so that's maybe why I would map those we have to map length it may be hard to tell over the GoToMeeting but but this the base length parameter is actually required the background is like slightly cream-colored versus the rest of them they're just white so in the case of structural shapes we have to map a length the rest of them are optional I just find it to be a best practice so just like now our part is in the content center and if we were to start a brand new assembly just go to place from content center we would see in our structural shapes other we do have that new shape and if I double click to place it I can choose based on width and height and then I could type in whatever length I wanted and this is the this is what I was talking about with a file name this is gonna be the name of that file that comes out by default regardless of the length that I put in so without any changes to the content center I'm gonna have to be pretty careful when I place these shapes so maybe you know name this thing uniquely say with the length that I it typed in I'll show you here in just a minute how we can customize the content center so that the length gets added in automatically so just like that now I have a piece of extruded aluminum and my content center that I can you know start making frames with alright so let's talk just a little bit about the frame generator now I'm not sure how much time I want to spend on this I do have I'm gonna ask everyone a question just to get an idea of what the experience level with frame Geri's so if everyone could just take a second and and answer this question if you basically the question is have you ever used or do you use inverse frame generator functionality basically have you never used it if you used it a few times or do you use it a lot I just want to get an idea of where we're at here oh thanks everyone for voting we're getting quite a few votes this is nice okay so most of you have voted now it looks like about half the group has used it a few times about a quarter of the group uses it very frequently and the quarter of the group has never used it at all so I'll go through this kind of quickly there are lots of resources for online for using the frame generator the help is really good so let's just kind of go through this quickly since most of the group has used it you know at least a few times or use it frequently so we'll target if I'm going to talk about you know creating your skeletons adding members the in treatments and then there are a couple of new things in 2015 that you may not be aware of when you're using frame joinery you're generally going to start out with a skeleton it's going to be a separate part file that contains edges that somehow define member locations be at the centerline of a member or may be the top-left corner those edges can be Center lines now in 2015 or say an exterior edge of the shape that you're going to place also keep in mind that just because your frame is 3d it doesn't mean your sketches have to be it can be difficult to sketch in 3d and inventor if you've got a lot of practice with it it's not so bad but there's no reason that you have to use a 3d sketch to create a frame unless you're making some crazy curved member that requires you know a 3d sketch but if you're sticking with just straight members like you're actually building just a frame out of it you can build up your skeleton from a series of 2d sketches and when I do that I like to use projected geometry across the sketches to make sure that if things are symmetric they stay that way and simplify changes to the sketch so once your skeleton is done then you would go to add members so any edge can be used to specify a member that's a sketch edge say in your skeleton or even the edge of an existing part like another part so let's say you have a table and you want to put a guard on that table I have this extruded aluminum you could pick the edge of the table and say the edge of the table is actually defines the lower right hand corner of the shape and that will let you use the table to lay down the member so you wouldn't necessarily have to have a sketch to use it construction lines can be used now in your in your sketch in your skeleton now by default every edge you pick is going to result in a separate IPT file you so even if you know let's say you had a three foot by three foot cube by three foot cube frame even if a lot of the members are exactly the same length every edge you pick is going to be a separate IPT file that does lead to you know some maybe some headaches here and there when you're managing the files now in 2015 they've now added the ability to reuse members I will show you that specifically since that's new to 2015 you can select multiple edges when you make these frames you can control the offset in both directions from the edge and rotation you can mirror the components so there are lots of ways you can leverage the sketch that you made or existing model edges to build this frame you don't have to sit and figure out for every member where is its center line and draw it just right you can get it close and then you if you have to tweak its location you can do so now when we put in these members and what you'll see is that they're all gonna overlap right we're just starting out we're laying roughing out the frame and then we ultimately we ultimately determine how the ends meet up right we can do miters we can do notches we can sort of trim and extend members ultimately so we can clean this this frame up and then ultimately get exactly the the shapes that we need so we can detail them or or you know so that they come out the right length on ability riyals let's say it was like four I don't know if you use extruded aluminum frames my experience has been we wouldn't sometimes we would use like the bracket hardware to fasten things but as often it's not we would actually you know counter bore through one member and then tap the center hole of the adjoining member and just screw the frames together as opposed to using the mounting hardware it saves a little bit of money if it's if you've got guys that can you know quickly you know drill and tap everything so in that case we would just order a bunch of straight sections to length you know not do any fancy miters or anything so we just have a cut list if you do your din treatments right the cut let's just sort of falls out of as a result of doing all green treatments right now one of the big new functions for frame generator in 2015 is the ability to reuse members this does a couple of things that simplifies the file management but personally I think especially if you're using vault that's not the real benefit the benefit is if you've got parts that really need to be the same if you're if they are symmetric you know if the end treatments are the same and if you're adding some special features to them that need to be the same you can reuse those members modify one part and just like a normal part that you've reused you know the changes you know impact all instances are all occurrences of that part right a couple of notes about it any instruments you apply will always be applied to the parent member and then they will carry over of course to the children now you can control the offset rotation and you know mirror of the of the reused components so especially if they're not if they're if they're not necessarily symmetric but mirrored you can you can work with that right so I'm gonna I'm gonna pull out a version of my assembly here I'm not going to bother creating this skeleton because I mean most people if you've taken an interest in this webcast you probably at least know how to make some sketches I'm gonna fetch out a version of my assembly that has just the skeleton all right so I created a skeleton here you can see if we look at my skeleton part this is really just a series of 2d sketches various work planes alright and then to use frame generator I just go to the design tab and insert frame we can see here's my 80/20 standard I have my 45 45 and my 45 90 I published this one yesterday this is the one I just did this morning so this is my 90 by 45 if I have not selected a ski columns my height and width then I would have something here would just say unnamed one for example if you notice my 45 45 the size is just 45 because that's why picked you know just a single parameter for that so if you're publishing your own members always add at least one additional parameter from your iPart table to your key columns when you publish otherwise it's going to be hard for you to to know exactly what you're getting here so let's say I'll pick my size when I pick an edge notice how it's placing this down on to the frame I get a nice preview of it when I create the frame I want to it's going to make a new assembly file right and a new skeleton as reference you're going to want to make sure that these things get named uniquely usually you know with like something related to the project you're working on the job number order number whatever it might be now this is the one element of frame generator I think just a bit frustrating the name of the individual members ultimately comes out from some combination of like the file name from the content center and then it's going to tack on this unique number at the bottom at the end of it the thing is this number comes it's always the same so if it's a you know if it's a you know a 2x2 square tube like some ANSI tube if you use that in frames across like everything you do you're gonna have a lot of similarly named files across all of your jobs so what I what I like to do this is one of the reasons I really like vault because I can check this thing into vault and then use rename once it's involved to make them unique so that's a question we've just got any tips on managing members and enforce unique file name and vault right and if you if you use this functionality a lot and you use vaults and you follow the best practice of making your files uniquely named in vaults this can cause you trouble so what I like to do is when I put a new frame into vault I immediately use the rename functionality to rename the files in vault that way they become unique so that the next frame I put in it'll go in without any trouble otherwise you have to come into each file and try to give it a new name I'm sure somewhere on the idea station is a request to like do a replace or you know other boxes like this we have the ability to put in a prefix for a suffix on the file name and we don't have that here ultimately I think it might be coming so just like that now you see the members are getting placed it's pulling out the members and there we go this thing is complaining at me because I need I don't have it checked out so we're gonna check it out here we're getting really short on time so I want to make sure we get to some of the other things so just to show you quickly how we might do intruments here I can always miter and it will trim one against the other so that's really nice about the reviews so let's say that I take this member here if these really are gonna be the same these two I could choose reuse I could say that's the number I want to reuse and I want to put it over here so just like that they're now the same model file but you notice what happened the miter that was on the original of course carries over to this one because they're the same part file but it's flipped the wrong direction so what I may ultimately need to do is either mirror or rotate let's just try 180 here unfortunately you notice the preview that I get I don't see the miter in the preview so you may have to guess a little bit when you use reuse but ultimately that now does the trick now I can come back and still miter this against that it's not going to apply a second miter to this member because it's the child but it is going to miter this unique member up against it so that it'll work out okay so I'm gonna leave the frame generator stuff there since most of the group has actually kind of used it before so let's move on to modifying the content center I don't know that will necessarily get into the frame analysis part that was kind of an extra if we have time but I want to make sure we spend a little bit of time talking about modifying the content center because this is this is something that a lot of people don't understand well or don't know how to do right so we're gonna talk about modifying custom library files modifying your family properties and your family tables how you handle materials with the content center and finally updating family templates now one thing that if I've not touched content server for a while sometimes I have to remember this like how to do this particular thing and it comes with when you want to modify your library files themselves when you edit your content center if you go to your manage ribbon the contents and our editors right here by defaults you're put into what's called a merged view and when you are in a merged view you see the contents of all libraries kind of stacked up together and you notice some of these files have like some of these categories are like light gray some of them are yellow anything that's in light like lightly colored that's read-only you can't change that object in addition I have no like add new categories I can change the category properties of some things right but I don't have I don't have a whole lot of functionality here if I switch my library view however to only show my library greater than I only see the contents of my library but now I have additional capability like I can now create a category here right or I could you know copy a category I could move this thing around if I head into the library to move it to so some things you may need to switch your library view to specifically view your library right so one question we got can you rename a custom category folder inside the content center this is how I would do it so that is renamed but if I go back to my merged view we still have well you know I say that but it actually now is called my other parts is so even though the other libraries had a folder called other parts when we look at our merged view and by default when you're replacing from Content Center you're always going to see a merged view you know this is how this is how I would do it so if you need to if you need to rename if you want to rename any of these categories you might first need to copy that category to your library and then once it's in your custom library then you could modify now keep in mind if you copy the category it's going to copy all of the contents of the category so if you do that say with the fasteners category it's going to take you a little while and you're going to take a long time actually and your custom library could get very large so be careful if you try to do the entire category if you do just a single like a single member like come in here and grab just this bearing right click copy to my library this is how you would modify a custom account Center a default part now that category is here and I could change the name of the category at this point so but remember that library view you may need to switch to your specific library to make some changes modifying families is what you're gonna be doing most of the time you're not usually manipulating a library all that much now some things you can do and we're going to use the specific example of this 4590 that I published right-click family properties this is where I could change the name with a description this is also where I could control the parameter mapping remember that same thing now we can modify it or the thumbnail if I don't like the way the picture looks as far as the table goes this is how you specify the properties you know properties parameter changes add new members one of them is the file name if we remember when I put this thing when I placed from the contents enter the file name that came out was just you know basically this part number right if I want to modify the file name so that it's unique by default based on the length I need to modify this column and what we can do is any of these columns can be an expression we can add together multiple columns here so this is going to be my file name I want the member name as the root and then maybe I want to tack onto the end of it a the length so I can insert the length here and so now rather than it being the same every time I place it's going to tack on the length of the member that I put in so now my file names will we start out unique based on length we can add our own columns here and we can map this column to various properties of the documents so if we want our you know our cost center to be filled out for contents inner parts we can do that or the big one especially with fasteners is the part number because they have this generic Bazaar part number that nobody actually uses you might need to change this or you could add your own column with your own custom part numbers and then just remove the mapping from this column and apply it say to maybe the stock number column we could map this instead to project that part number right so any of these columns can be mapped there's a question here would would that be an approach to making custom two sizes for example so yes if let's say that one of the big ones I get all the time is aluminum aluminum tubing so if you we do have you know like steel tubing if you're okay with having the rounded corners and you just kind of want to make an example of it but you need to modify the thicknesses and whatnot you can always copy to your library now that it's here I could modify the family table and I could tweak the individual sizes to match what's basically aluminum tubing I'd also want to modify the material of course alright that gets us into materials right because some of these things some you know components especially our fasteners I think they might start out with mild steel or whatever well if you want to be able to specify stainless steel screws or aluminum or you know different materials like stainless steel I guess we've got some stainless steel troops already but if it's a custom part that you've made and you want to be able to specify multiple materials material is ultimately a column in that table right so you have to specify what the material is now if you want to have different materials for different families you can do that in a couple ways one you could introduce a column for material and then you could have all of the material variations in the same table and so you go through all the mild steel ones and then you have another 73 rows for aluminum and then another 73 rows for stainless the other way is to make a whole new family where all of these things are the same and just the material is different now there's something to help you with that it's something called the material guide this is sort of a wizard that walks you through and say do you want to create a new family for each material or do you want to add new rows right so we'll just add new rows to this family here and we're gonna add let's say let's do stainless steel and if there are existing materials in the library you can take them back out right so this is a good way to just kind of duplicate all of these things and it's gonna go through and add a whole bunch of new rows to the table so now we should have 146 rows where some of them are stainless steel and some of them are mild steel because this is especially important with standard content center shapes that you can't modify what you once you pull them out you need to specify the material when you select them and this is a good way to make that happen so usually with your fasteners is where you're gonna want to do something like that and we're just about out of time I want to talk about modifying templates if you need to modify the actual geometry here so let's say that when I published when I published this part there was a problem with the geometry I don't have to republish it I can modify what's here I would ultimately need to place at least one copy of this guy I can't start with what I published from I would need to place this somewhere then I would modify that part and then I can replace family template and that lets me point to that modified part and it will update the geometry not the rows right none of the row definitions just the geometry you want to avoid removing any parameters that were there though because if you do that it's gonna invalidate the family and you might have to republish it at that point all right and we're basically out of time you know I just want to talk about just some things you can do with frame analysis you know you can you put the frame together especially with frame generator it will automatically figure out how it like joints for all of the members how they could connected you know and then you you we specify the beam properties most of those to come from the shapes themselves specify materials much like a general FAA analysis where you have to say how is this thing constrained and how is it loaded you do all of that the thing is if you use something like frame analysis um it's much much faster than a traditional analysis because if we're looking at a shape like this if I'm gonna do a traditional FAA analysis on this part and it's very long let's say it's you know what are we looking at where's the length here um you know 500 millimeters long if I'm gonna mesh this with like a traditional Fe a analysis the elements are gonna have to be really tiny to do a good analysis on this whereas if it's just um if it's you know just this member if we know it's sections we can actually do a different analysis type that's more more math than anything you know mathematical as opposed to like discretizing the solution and that's what the frame analysis does so the result is the thing solves much much faster than just like an FAA analysis we can still get things like deflection natural frequency which can be really important you know normal stresses you know we can get you know bending diagrams let me just pull out this they do have a finished version of it let's see here just you can kind of see the what the results might be like alright so we're when our frame analysis module so you can see you know we have access to all of the beams it determines how things are connected you can control the joints so if they're not rigidly fixed if they're kind of pinned together if they can slide against each other you can specify all of that you know just like you know the other analyses you can you know adjust the way the deflection looks you can you know animate the deflection so you can see it actually you know how this would deflect based on the loading and it solves very quickly it's very easy to use so and with that I think we need to wrap it up other than just questions so I think we've had a few questions come in so far a couple of get to address so let's see right if you don't use vault could the custom content center be put on a server to share between designers yeah scare you did address that but ultimately you can put your libraries your desktop content libraries on the server and then point your project file to that location the recording of the webinar is going to be at here in a few days Hagerman com4 slash events for slash webcasts on demand if you want to get to it from just root sight if you go to Hagerman calm you can click on events and then webcast on-demand right over here on the left another question I have an assembly that I have created that doesn't use any foreign members the assembly gets used on a frame how can I make it so the assembly is seen in the frame assembly since the assembly does not add a significant amount of strength to the frame so I'm assuming this is for the frame analysis environment I think ultimately what you would need to do the way I think I would take care of that because you can only if it's not a if it's not a frame member then you can't there's no way of representing it in the frame analysis environment what you could do however is you could add what are called rigid links so ultimately if it's just adding stiffness so like in this case we can see in this part it's not very stiff right it moves quite a bit because these big open areas if I was putting like a big plate if I was gonna weld a plate on this corner ultimately what I'd be saying is especially in this configuration it's almost like taking a point here and rigidly affixing it to a point over here it's not really gonna flex much so I would the way I would do that as I was I would add a couple of custom nodes say right there you know whatever the extents of the plate would be there and there and then I would add a rigid link between those two nodes ultimately it's providing stiffness between those two almost like if it was a gusset but I don't actually have the gusset on there and now if I run this simulation let me show you how fast it is right so now I'm getting significantly less flex in that corner than I would otherwise because I'm saying that those two are fundamentally get attached so that's how I would I would approximate it let's see an earlier question from Joseph when using copy design function involved why does Vault convert a frame generator assembly from a weldment type I am to a standard inventor I am that's a good question um my guess is it may be using you know I'd really have to look at that just so we might have to get an answer to you I never really noticed that before I guess I never go so far as to convert my frame generator assemblies to weldments the only reason I can think of that it would be that it would do that is if it was actually using a template - if it was using a template to rebuild the assembly but that doesn't make sense so it may be something that they specifically they specifically decided to do is to change it from a weld nut but let me I'm gonna make note of that and I'll get back with you if I can find out why my guess as though you you can't necessarily change that it does that unfortunately question is can we gusset in the frame so it sees the rigid constraint in the frame you can put it on there but it's not going to recognize it in the frame analysis environment it's only gonna recognize basically authored structural shapes so if it was like a plate gusset now if it's a tube sure as long as it's you know a custom like if you publish it to the content center or authored it but if it's a plate you have to you have to insert custom nodes and and do a rigid link that way ultimately I think the reason this didn't necessarily get so well tied up if it was around this entire corner here yeah I think you would you would try to tie these three together as opposed so you would tie this one so the parent up here and then tie that one to that one that's how you would do if it was a gusset because you're ultimately you're saying that that these nodes aren't allowed to move relative to each other adding rigidity to the frame any other questions first enough sharing content center files between 10 designers on a company server while I experience a significant slowdown of loading versus the vault method my guess is no people are going to be hitting those files somewhat infrequently I mean unless all 10 people did nothing but place content all day I can't imagine that you would see a significant difference in performance one from the other they've optimized the content center pretty effectively - it caches a lot of data so I don't think you would have any problem if you're using 10 if you have 10 designers and you're not using vault vault probably has a lot of benefits aside from the the content center stuff but if you are using ball and you just want to use the desktop content instead of the vault server I don't see any any drawback in and using just the desktop content for a group that size any other questions can you have multiple frames in one assembly yes each time you choose to insert members I believe it will well I believe actually I think it's going to put them all in the same frame you would have to like making it a different I think in a different assembly and then insert it you might want to make it in a sub low assembly I think to be the way you would do it okay well I think we'll wrap it up there I'm gonna get back with that one answer to Joseph about why it strips the weldment property out otherwise thanks everyone for attending if you'd like to review this webcast don't forget it will be available on our web cast on demand here in a few days and good luck with friend generator thank you

Channel: Hagerman & Company, Inc.

Views: 11,927

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Autodesk Inventor; Frame Generator;

Id: kWHAI2MKMXI

Length: 70min 0sec (4200 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2015