Freeform Modelling Tutorial | Autodesk Inventor

hello sad welcome to TFI card tips tips tricks and or tutorials if you haven't heard and on today's agenda well you know what's on today's agenda cuz you've seen the title and the thumbnail and there's no point in building up to it so let's move on it's free for modeling and I've been meaning to do this for so long it's been on the agenda for ages it's not that I haven't got around to doing it it's just such a phenomenally big topic that I just didn't know where to start I didn't know how much information to include and if I'm being perfectly honest I still don't making this up as I go along but I thought it's about time I did it so I'm just going to freestyle it like Fat Boy slim so let's get going so a couple of disclaimers before we get going as always I can't cover everything and there's probably quite a few people who are watching this with something in their mind that they know they need to design in the hope and that I'm going to show them how it designed that thing con I can't do that afraid freeform modeling and the reason why is three for modeling is it get complete game changer when it comes to designing stuff and invent it in absolutely it's no exaggeration it's a game changer it's been around for about a year now and it's been developed from 2015 it 2016 a few little tweaks little additions here or there which have massively helped and it's it allows you to create literally anything doesn't matter what it is any shape or any size you can model anything and a lot of those things were completely either impossible or just nightmarish to try and do using sketches and revolves and sweeps and lofts and stuff so the fact that you can model literally anything makes it really difficult to do a tutorial video on it because what do you do where do you start I could do I could model a mouse not not a hairy furry chased by a cat mouse but like a keyboard mouse for example I could do one of those from start to finish but then you might be thinking well I don't want to I've got don't want to do a mouse I want to model the case for an Xbox 360 you know what I mean I might I can't cover literally everything because you can't model anything using freeform anyway what I thought I'd do instead is I'll take you through the basics of how you start something in freeform so the various different processes you can go through to get something created and then some of the basic edit and tools and some tips and tricks for the Edit and tools as well again not everything this is just a beginner's guide right now you can't do and nobody can do an advanced guide on free for modeling and advanced I would suspect a training course for free for modeling is probably an entire day or even two days there's that much in it but you know the panel is tiny little three buttons up there but it just opens up a whole world of of just epic proportions it's been invented as been luck in this for so long in the fact that it's in now is just amazing and I will not mention fusion the fusions of thing I guess that's what this has been taken from but it's good that it's in invent and out keeping up with the Joneses all the other 3d packages out there which have being able to do this sort of thing for a long time but will not go there okay right let's get going so free form and I mean if I even explain what it is I'm not going to use any funky terminology like you know T splines because if you're a beginner you'd be like what the hell's a t-spline I don't know I'm going to keep it simple i but free form allows you to create aesthetically pleasing shapes you know think of hairdryers think of weird sort of hairdryer shaped casings if you work in manufacturing and you do metal skids frameworks shushies handrail industrial machinery everything's metal it's probably not going to be that much of a use to you but if you work in consumer product design it will be so it allows you to create shapes that's probably the best way putting it allows you to create shapes that you would otherwise not be able to do using standard sketches and profiles and extrudes and lofts and sweeps and stuff so the way we start as we go new and then we've got a standard IPT and then you've got this insignificant-looking panel at the top which is not insignificant it opens a whole world of opportunities so you got three ways of starting a free-form you've got your standard primitives box cylinder sphere torus and quad bore face and then convert so I'm going to take you through all three of those how they can be used and then further on into editing so whether or not you pick a box or cylinder or a Taurus or whatever else it's going to give you it's going to throw some shape see it like a 70s disco it's going to throw some shapes of you and give you a dialog box and round of applause to order desk for giving us a dialog box and not some ludicrous stupid mini toolbar which if they change it to that I will lose my I won't but I just rather not see that if you may so you've got your dialog box and then what you do is you say or I think if you've got the Box in your hand you're going to place the box onto the face right so you're going to say this face this face or this face right and it kind of doesn't really matter really it doesn't but you pick one of these faces and then it says well where's the center of the box going to be and normally in this when you start something from scratch that is going to be the midpoint of the part which is there that little dot and then that centers the box on that dot so in the middle of the box is on the dot and then the box is pressed up against that face that you clicked in the first place well you can then do if you want to has just change the direction so instead of the Box being resting it are arrested against the face you can say go symmetrical use that plane that face as a center line for the box and for just reasons you know just for symmetry I guess and then you can specify your dimensions which should don't need an explanation of what a length width and height is but you can change these so you can say well 150 and then you can see the box of date and 100 and then height of maybe 50 and then you can see it changing in size right one of the most important parts of this starting the free form is the number of faces that you give your primitive primitive being obviously description of Ede being a shape a box the number of faces dictates how much scope you've got for editing this later on so at the moment we've got two faces on the length the width and the height which means we've got two phases here on two that's the length one two that's the width and then two faces here for the height now the more faces you give your primitive the more points and edges and faces there are four you delete it edit it but it does make editing it a little bit more tricky because you've got more localized faces yeah what I'm trying to say is if I was to grab this face here and pull it and make a change to this face here I've got a huge surface area to pull if I've made if I make it smaller so let's say if I give it eight faces and I pull one of these faces now it's pulling and editing a smaller localized region so there's pros and cons to having more faces but also be aware the more faces that you give the part the it changes the shape if you look at the corners here that's quite a big round radius there if we change the the number of faces on the height to be four you can see its square in the corners off a bit more so again just be aware it doesn't more faces doesn't increase the height it's just cramming more faces across that 50 mil all equally divided across the 50 mil which ultimately rounds the corners off so nothing wrong with that if that's what you want if that's the look you're going for again I can't tell you how this should be because this could be any in this box could end up being at the top of where container or it could be a PC case it could be anything so that's what you do you say length width and height the number of faces and then you can also pre-program in symmetry and what I mean by that is if you were to say I want length symmetry it will hard-code a bit of symmetry in the middle of the part so that any changes you do on this side are automatically made on that side and that can be a huge time saver because if the part is going to be symmetrical the way freeform works is it's not that precise and doing something twice you might you might not be able to do something twice you can get really creative with it and being able to do something the exact same way twice might be quite difficult in some cases so programming and symmetry means that if I change this it'll change on this side at the same time and then the same applies for width so it's changing something here will then change it here here and here and then the same for height it puts a line of symmetry and in the middle alright well let's just keep symmetry going through the length okay another thing to just consider just to keep in your mind about these phases when you look at the phases and you see the grid think of the grid as points and places to make further changes so your freeform is broken up into phases edges and points right these faces edges and points are all entities that you can use to manipulate and change your model so I can make it change by grabbing that point and pulling the point I can make a change by grabbing the edge and pulling the edge and the same for the face so the more edges the more faces the more points you have the more edges faces and points you've got to edit later on so that's starting a free-form using a box alright let's undo and the same applies like I said before for cylinders you pick a face you pick a point and then you add additional faces six faces and six faces for example same thing goes for all the other primitives we've also got plane now a plane I think this is unique to 2016 I don't think this was in 2015 but this allows you to pick a flat surface pick a center point and it will just give you a flat face which you can subdivide up if you want to and that's just like a sheet think of it as it's not really a sheet of metal because it doesn't have any depth it's just a it's like a flat surface but you can then grab these points and start pulling this up to create like maybe cloth I don't know why you're the model coffin inventor but for all intents purposes that's what this could end up being so that's a face and just well not a plane we've also got face right so moving on to the second type of creation method right we've got face freeform it gives you a dialog box with your planes again you can you've got two different options here you've got simple mode and you've got edge mode I would stick to simple for now again I'm trying to keep this as basic as possible and you've got a four-sided shape or four sided face or a mold sided face so if we stick with four-sided face select the plane you want the face to be on and then you select four points one two three four and it will give you a face once you click done that is then a face it doesn't have any edges you'd have to then use the likes of subdivide to put multiple faces and edges and whatnot in it but then that's a flat face ready for you to edit the final one and this is one that I absolutely love I love this one is convert it allows you to create something pre freeform and converted into a free-form so for example let's do its to a normal traditional sketch right so let's do a I don't know a line down here and then let's do a like a an arc there and then a an arc there and then I don't know something like that and then that'll do finish that sketch and then what I can do is extrude my sketch into a surface so we can go then or something like that click OK and then using convert we can convert these surfaces into a free-form mesh and look at that you hang it all right ok one now well then this leads us on into the different editing options that we've got so it's just extra stern off the visibility the original surface and this brings us on into the Edit blind look how many buttons that all that this is why I haven't done this yet so my buttons man right well edit form edit form is the most common one that you'd use alright what you do is you pick edit form and then you use the faces edges or points to make a manipulation to make a change to the freeform that you've got so you'd say right well I want to make a change to I don't know these two faces here so you can click that face hold down control select a second face and then using the Triad you can grab the arrow heads and then you can pull and push those two faces so look at the way that's behaving when you grab two faces to quite large faces to grab two smaller faces it would behave in a very different way the free form depends entirely how many faces you've got an area that they cover what proportion of the area and respect the overall freeform they cover it's a lot of it's just trial and error so you grab the arrowheads and you'd move them around the arrowheads have got different toggles on them so the arrowheads are move it allows you to move the faces and then you've got these little axes here which allow you to rotate so that sort of rotates the faces which is again it lets you go nuts you can do all kinds of things so you can move then rotate and then move again like this I mean look at that you can do some weird with it it's mad it's not exactly you can be exact like for example I can grab this Arrowhead and I can put in a set distance here but it's not parametric which means anything that you do doesn't get but it gets safe but it doesn't get logged anywhere it's not like you've got a sketch in the browser that says you move this by 20 mil in freeform no doesn't that doesn't work it's it's just on the go it's just on-the-fly editing so you click OK and then that's the kind of mad stuff you can do with edit form so with that it formed that's picking a face but you can also pick a point and then grab a point and move it like this and that manipulates that face based on the point that you pick you might have thought that doesn't look normal that doesn't look natural you grab on that point and it's pulling it along the x-axis yeah well you can change the space about the Triads working on so at the moment it's world space but if you change it to local it'll reorient the triad based on the point itself so now I can grab this ro head here and it pulls the point kind of normal to the face of the points referencing which is quite handy so that's changing the space for your cursor and it works on pretty much any face so I can pick that face there select the space as being local and then make a change to that face based on that triad symmetry right I didn't add symmetry well I couldn't add symmetry to a convert but you can add it in later on by saying give me some symmetry and then pick in two faces and it will look at the line that intersects between the two faces and then add a line of symmetry into the part part of the freeform so now I want to make a change to this face here let's just do a local change and pull it you can see it's now going to make a change on both sides which is really handy so that's manipulating a face manipulating a point but we can also edit form unselect edges so we can pick up one we can hold down control and we can pick two edges again change that to local space and then we can say grab this edge here and just pull it we can let's just do that again I know what I'm trying to do is hold down shift edit form logo and then we can use that to sort of rotate the edges around actually that wasn't quite what I was going for but that'll do I load it okay some of the things that we can do I mean edit form gives you control over pretty much everything but a couple of the other edit options that you might need to know about you've got subdivide say you've got a large face and you want to you want to reduce the surface area and give yourself some more editing points you do subdivide you pick a face and then tell it how many faces and how many regions to divide it into so two by two so you pick that face and it will divide them up into two by two you know we do one at time so you have to do it okay subdivide and then give yourself some more regions to work with now we've got an additional point in here that we can use to manipulate that particular point there you go so that's quite handy to know about some other things that we've got this particular workflow that we've done reviews convert because we've converted multiple surfaces while there wasn't multiple services but there was multiple joints in the surface what you'll find is this happens there's a break in the surface so I need to join all these up and what you would do to do that is something called merge edges so you'd select merge edges and then you pick that edge that edge that edge and that edge and then for the second edge set you want to pick the Edge's so we've got two edges on top of each other there we've got the edge of this face then we've got the edge of this face so when you pick that edge or weird kind of funky goes on but then you want to just stick with it pick that second edge that third edge and then that fourth edge and what that does is it blends those together and then now one joined entity and you do the same over here so you pick that edge that edge there and they're set to will be there that that and that and I would do the same down there but laughs ah let's do it let's do it so we'll say merge edges that not so edge set to one that one that one and that one so what that's actually done is had to it's hard to make a slight change to the freeform to blend those together but I'm absolutely fine with that if you're not you can say edit form and then you can select those four faces and then just pull them down pull them back down to where they need to be so let's look sidon actually I'm quite happy without let's move that to about there then click okay all right I'm starting to get quite happy with this this is looking pretty good once you've finished let's just say we're finished I think that's probably enough for all the Edit and stuff there's a lot more you can do I mean you've got the likes of bridge but once you get used to like edit form once you get used to merge edges once you get used to edges and faces and points you can look at the tooltip and it starts to make sense so bridge pick two faces in a black pointing to the screen like and see my hand but it'll blend together two faces and create like a joint a free-form between two faces so there's all kinds of weird wonderful things you can do like that to just to go a little bit further with it but we're going to click finish when you click finish if you've done a convert it gives you this sort of surface here which is like right okay what do I do with this next well you can then use something like thicken pick thicken and then thicken this by I don't know maybe two mil and then you've got yourself a nice a nice solid which you can then turn off the free-form the background and then you've got this sort of weird chair shaped solid to work with look at that I mean try and do something like that without using freeform you'll be on it all day if not all week that's thickened in the part environment what you can also do if you go back into freeform is you can use free forms thickened which is this one here select thicken and then it'll do pretty much the same thing thicken the entire free form by a set thickness but what you can also do is you can say change it to a soft thicken and I'll kind of blend any hard corners off like that and I'll give you something looking a little bit like that isn't that just delicious ease all right then I think that's probably about enough for freeform think I've covered as much as I need to enough to get you started anyway so just to recap you've got face and convert which is what we recently just used but you've also got the likes of a box pick a face pick a point specify the amount of faces that you can use put in some symmetry if you need to and then use edit form to pick faces push and pull them in in this all sorts you can do from there don't forget you can move faces you can also rotate faces and what I didn't mention early run is you can also scale faces by using that Arrowhead with that way wouldn't it go but there's all kinds you can do literally all kinds of stuff you can do anyway guys I think that's probably bout enough so that's free form in in a rather large nutshell I think I don't know what the time of the video is now but I think I've gone on too long if it helped you out please press like on the video subscribe if you haven't already share it around and put a comment down below and yeah you

Channel: Tech3D

Views: 117,823

Keywords: Autodesk, Inventor, tips, training, guide, 3D, modelling, part, assembly, best practice, Solidworks, AutoCAD, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, Freeform, T-Spline, curves, organic, aesthetic, body

Id: VhbocKBbd4c

Length: 22min 4sec (1324 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2015