Everything about Work Planes | Autodesk Inventor

hello sir welcome to amended tips tricks tutorials oh my god I'm doing this video again I've already done it and it was 20 minutes long I'm not going to subject anybody to 20 minutes of work planes that's a bit harsh so I'm going to try and condense this and make it no more than 10 minutes if you looking at the video time is longer than 10 minutes I do apologize I just talk too much I'm doing it right now anyway work planes was work plane a work plane is a means to create sketches and make new features in your model so when you start up inventor and you've gotten in a part or assembly open you've got a work features area in your ribbon bar here which has got planes axes and points these are your work features and we're not looking at points and axes we're just looking at planes so when I was to be an autodesk instructor so doing you know eight or less training centers training courses and I used to always explain planes to people is bits of paper right you need to make a sketch you need to sketch a shape within your part and there's nothing to sketch on right so you say you want to create a cut through this here this plate but you don't wanna sketch on the face you want to sketch slightly offset from it you need a physical face to sketch on and that face is the plane and in terms of placing your sketch in the invented part think of the work plane it's like a bit of paper you're always going to be sketching on a flat face a flat plane and it's going to be like a paper thing so think of world planes as pieces of paper and you put these bits of paper inside the inventor space and that's the best way to think about them because when you play some work planes in funny positions it's always best think about it as like a flatbed a car or a bit of paper that you're putting down the sketch on so that's what a that's what a work plane is in essence and primarily they are used to create sketches to facilitate new sketches or to you know represent centre lines for creating a mirror something like that so there's loads of different ways of creating them and there's loads of different purposes I guess for work planes so straight out the box when you start a new part you're given an origin folder X you've got why is that plane X airplane and XY plane they they are work planes they're standard work planes that you can't change you can't do anything with them so you would typically utaite not always but typically you would use these to start a new part you would sketch on at the XY plane and then you would create sketch create a profile extrude up and then start modifying it from there but we'll get to a putt they'll be a point very soon afterwards where you need to create a sketch and you can't use these three standard work planes and you might not be able to use the faces of the geometry that you've created so far and that's when you start to need to use work planes so in the interests of trying to keep this as quick as possible I'm not going to go through every single method of creating a work plane but what I will say with a huge degree of confidence and controversy is don't use these these are relatively new in inventor and the there to assist beginners but I'm a beginner well yeah you are but but these options here what they do is they will restrict what you can click based on which one you select so if this one here for example three points this allows you to create a work plane intersected between three points but what it does is when you select this it stops you picking anything other than points which is great that is great but when you're a beginner you might not know that you might not know what you need to click you know where you want your plane to be you know where you want your sketch to be but you don't know what you need to click to get it there so if you've selected this one then you might have selected wrong and you've stopped any chance of being able to select the right way because your cursor is still stuck to just picking points so it's great if you know for sure for 100% that that's where you want the work plane to go but if you're just a beginner and you just get your head around it and you're playing around try to not use these they'll just block you the block you and not being able to pick the right thing so what I would suggest you do and this is what I use all the time I'm old-school Island I was I learn all this sort of stuff before any of these buttons existed so I'm trying to use this thing here so if you just use the plain button this lets you pick anything in the model absolutely anything faces edges and points and it will create a work plane based on whatever it is you click so like I said there are a number of different ways of making work planes and I'll go through the most common ones so one of the most common ones is just to select a flat face hold down the left mouse button and then pull away and then that will offset a work plane from that face by a set distance so if you type in 50 mil here and then click OK that creates a work plane 50 mil away from that face and it's adaptive so if that face moves then the work plane will move with it and you can then sketch on that plane like that and then that's your bit of paper in space so ready for you to sketch on right for that particular method there's probably somebody out there ready to jump in the comments you'll get it very slowly that wasn't really unproductive way of do really yeah all right so what that particular method that I've just shown you if you were to create a new sketch and then I'll do exactly the same thing hold down the left mouse button and then pull away and then say 50 mil and then okay that does like a two-in-one type thing that will create the work plane on the sketch at the same time so that's a little bit better I guess for that particular method of creating a work plane all right so once you've made a work plane there it is in space if you want to get rid of it you can write if you want to interact with a work plane by the way you've got a hover over the edge right you can't you can't interact with a work plane in the middle you've got a hover over the edge right click and then if you want to you can delete that work plane when you delete the work plane normally there are things associated with the work plane like sketches and then this features associated with that sketches is associated with the work plane so it's given the option here to delete everything that goes along with it so that's sketch there is associated to that work plane do I want to delete the dependent sketch and feature yes and the way it goes all right so that's the first common way of making a work plane another really common work plane creation method is to create a work plane and then pick a flat face and then pick a second flat face and what that will do is it will intersect a work plane through the middle of those two faces essentially finding you the centerline of your part so if I was to click there that work plane is now representing the scent line of the part and again it's adaptive so if this face was to move up that work plane would follow to always be central between these two faces and then you can use this plane here is like say for example let's do a mirror of that feature and then the mirror plane would be this work plane here and that would that's essentially a center line for a mirror alright so that's one way that's another way of doing a work plane other ways are like for example angled with angled work planes a tricky do you head around and again you've got to think of the the paper or you know think of the work plane is a card concept so if you want to create an angled work then what you do is you'd say right give me a work plane and I want the work plane to be angled around this edge here so you click that edge so think of this now right think of having a bit of a four card in your hands and you're going to put the a4 card on this edge now that card can spin around the edge it's touching the edge but it can spin around it you've then got to say to an vendor right this is the angle I want the card to be but you can't view you can't verbally tell in vendor where you've got to click things and say right well this is the angle based on a flat face so you say right hinge the card around that edge but click that face and then you can sell you can tell inventor I want the card or the plane to be angled 45 degrees from that face there so it's hinging intersecting the work plane through that edge that we clicked and then it's going to be 45 degrees from that face and you can put in a negative value as well negative 45 degrees click OK and then there's your worth playing angled work plane and what you can also do as well is you can create work planes to create further work planes that work plane there could exist purely to make another work plane so I might now want to create another work plane hold the left mouse button down on the edge of that work paint and then drag away and then that first work plane exists to do nothing else other than make this work plane here and now we've got an angled offset work plane which again is adaptive if that one was to move that one would move you know this face was to change angle then these always be 45 degrees from that face so nothing wrong with doing that at all okay other ways of making work planes sketches for example so if we say let's create a sketch on this face here create a sketch on a flat face doesn't make a work plane it doesn't need one because you've got if you've got an entity there to sketch on so it doesn't need to make a work plane for that but what we can do is create like it and I'll say an arc like that finish that sketch and you can create a work plane associated to the end point of the arc so you might want to put a work plane parallel to the end point of the arc so you create a sweep like a pipe or a cable or a cut or something like that so you create work plane you would select the end point of the arc and then if you pick the actual arc itself it will create a work plane which is always going to be parallel a certain apparel perpendicular to the end point of that arc so if the arc itself was to move right here and then we click update' the work plane will always be normal and perpendicular to the end point of that arc and then what you can do is sketch on that work plane press f7 slice the graphics that point there that's the end point of the arc so it can project that and then we can create a circle something like this finish the sketch and then we can obviously this is got nothing to do work planes it's just kind of it you know finishing the story type thing there's cut using that word plane and that cut is now perfectly kind of you know it's it's absolutely sound and legit because the word plane is at the right angle so that's another way of creating a work plane this loads of ways I mean I wish I could go through the you know you can create click word planing pick you know that point that point and then sort of on that point there another intersect the work plane between all those three points loads of different ways the best like I said at the very start the best thing to do is to use this button here and then that will let you click anything just click things and then all right so if I click that face there and then and then I was to click that there so I've got a work plane there right I see what it's doing so if I was to click that face and then that point ah so it's gonna it's going to intersect a plane through that point but at the same angle as that face I see see what I mean you can then get a bit creative with it it'll let you click various different things if it puts a word playing somewhere you don't like you can just undo and then there's nothing lost okay so that's a couple of different ways of creating work planes what I want to do now is just show you some different interactions you can have with your work planes now the first and most not and probably not the most important thing but is the work plane size visibly on-screen your work plane is it's that big right that's it it gives the illusion of only being able to sketch within that rectangle not true if you were to create a sketch on this plane for example you're not restricted to sketching just within it work planes are infinite in size mind blown that the others there's no edges to them they represent an infinite plane an infinite face running through space but visibly within your modeling environment it has to represent the work plane somehow to show you that it's there so it gives you this rectangle now the best way to prove this is just there's the work plane I'm going to zoom out and I can create you know eating sketch anything you want your sketching on the plane of that work plane but it can be any size you want but we're still on the same edge as the work plane now if you want the work if you find that you're sketching something and your work plane is sort of being dwarfed and it's fading off into nothingness what you can do is right-click on the work plane itself and then select Auto resize and it'll resize the work plane to suit whatever sketches are associated to it so it'll just sort of magnify itself around the largest sketch and if you do change that sketch it'll always increase the size of the work plane because the work plane set to auto resize a couple of other things which are quite important for work planes is the you can't really miss it but there's two colors on a work plane you've got an orange side and you've got a blue side or a purple side depending on you know your screen colors not orange is positive blue is negative it doesn't really matter until you start doing exclusions and offsets so for example if I was to sketch on this work plane and then extrude this sketch anything in a positive direction is going to come away from the orange face so a positive value is coming away from the orange side of the word plane if I put a negative value in it's going to go in the opposite do okay no you can't really have to know your context do it in a negative direction can you I'm light but if you were to offset plane from this word plane that way orange way is a positive value blue value at the blue face is a negative value that's that's pretty much it if you've created work planes and you find in a mixture of orange and blue faces and it's just killing your OCD you can interact with the edge of the work plane right click on it and then flip normal will flip the blue in the orange side and it will flip any sketches and features which are already created so if we would extrude again extrude that there that's extruded in the positive direction if we would have flipped the work plane it will then exit the extrusion so because it's a positive value extrusion it's always going to come away from the orange side of the face right off hope happen to the hope this isn't too long right turning them off interact with the edge of a work plane right clicking there you can untag visibility and that'll turn the work plane off once you've used to work when you tend it's there's no hard and fast rule but in most cases you tend not to need to use them again so you can just turn them off and you'll seeing your brows or any work planes which we've got a gray icon have been turned off you're going to right-click on them and you can turn them back on and there is a shortcut for doing this for all work planes you can go the view ribbon bar and then go to object visibility and then turn off either all work features which is all access points on planes or you can just uncheck user work planes and the shortcut key for that is alt and square brackets and that will just turn them off turn them back on again you can rename work planes if you want to I wouldn't recommend it because you get that many of the meat and edible hundreds of work planes in a complex part so rename and there would just be a waste of time but if it's something important you can you know you can type stuff and then rename them whatever you want them to be you can right-click on interact with work planes in the browser as well you just get a more structured menu wait and create a new sketch you can edit the dimension that dimension if you see edit dimension on a work plane that's because the work planes been created using like an offset value if you just if you intersected a work plane between two faces there is no numeric dimension controlling that work plane so you won't see that option but if you do have edit dimension there that means you've got a value which you can edit so this is because I offset that work plane by 50 mil edit dimension and then you can change that to whatever you want it to be no visible change money because the you I'm zoomed out that far so let's edit dimension so there's a work plane which doesn't have a dimension to edit this one does redefine feature is quite an interesting one redefine feature will let you completely redo the work plane from scratch and I'm going to get rid of these because I'm starting to lose what I'm looking at let's get rid of him delete get rid of this delete yes delete all consumes yeah so if you delete work cover carvaka with that yes you can delete work planes and then I'll get rid of all consumed sketches and features okay right so yeah redefining work planes so for example if we were to create a work plane between this face here and then this face here battle intersector working through the middle not sure why it's made it up big but you can if it's a good thing it did if you want to manually resize a work plane you can do by hovering over the edges of the grips and you can either move them around if you miss the grip or there you go you can change the size like that but redefining a work plane right-click on it if you select redefine and notice as well if had a this so but this work planes I've just resized it and it sort of moved the work plane away from the model which just sort of blows your mind boggles your mind the work plane is actually still going through the middle of the part it's just sort of moved away but you can see there it is still intersecting the middle so right-click on a work plane if you've got a redefined feature you can then click two different faces and then you can completely reposition that work plane and it'll cross something right pig's ear this way it'll reposition the work plane based on the new inputs that you select you guys making it that big no mine alright I think that's probably about enough so that's where planes if you liked the video if it was useful slap that like button give it a good clapping subscribing and already and until next time cheery-bye

Channel: Tech3D

Views: 128,352

Keywords: Autodesk, Inventor, tips, training, guide, 3D, modelling, part, assembly, best practice, Solidworks, AutoCAD, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, Work Planes, Construction features

Id: KdJAYagKNVY

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2015