How to 3D Sketch | Autodesk Inventor

hello and thank you for coming along to my inventor 3d sketching tips and tricks moreover what the hell is 3d sketching than tips and tricks but well we'll see what we can do now I've done many seminars in the past on in vendor - too many people too many engineering companies all over the world and when I finish up and I say right you know what I'm here guys or is there anything you want to know most people say 3d sketching I need to do something with 3d sketching or I've heard I can use it but I don't really know how to work it and I get that I completely get it 3d sketching is useful to many people but it's not the most intuitively or best-designed part of inventor let's say so I thought I'd dedicate a bit of time to it just to give anybody who needs a bit of a head start on it a bit of fair a bit of a clue on what's going on with it so here I've got a new part file and on the ribbon bar along the top you see we've got the button start 2d sketch now I'm going to invent a 2015 which is the current release as of today as I'm recording this video if you've got a previous version in vendor the button might look a bit different but it's there it's in the same place and 3d sketching is also in the same place which is I'll show you that in a second so what's the difference between a 2d in a 3d sketch you know you might be thinking well do i neva need 3d sketch I mean did what what does it do well you again that's the whole point you know you might want to know about it but you don't know what it does now with its traditional 2-dimensional sketch when you hit that button to say start a new sketch event it presents you with a few starting points the best way to think about sketching it with 2d sketches is to take these origin planes these this XY plane this Y Z plane and this exit plane if you run an earlier version of inventor there won't be on the screen but what you will find in the origin folder is they are there and you'll be able to see them if you just hover over them don't click them just hover over them they'll appear in the graphics window now if you think of these planes as bits of paper that's the best way to think about and think of them is a bit of paper and you're about to lay your pen on that bit of paper creating a 2d sketch or starting a 2d sketch is you're placing your pen onto this bit of paper and whatever you sketch all the lines arcs and circles that you sketch will be completely restrained and restricted to that plane so up down left right on that particular plane you can't go up above it down below it it's completely on that plane so for this plane you'll be sketching in you know the XY direction so you line to be going this way and that way and same for the XZ plane and the ey happening so if I create a sketch on this XY plane it gives me a sketch plane it gives you Roxy's might give you grid lines if you've got them switched on and if you draw a line and go up down left right you can go all over the shop like this you can zoom out and you can go up here down there way all over the place like this and when you finish your sketch and then you do a bit of a 3d zoo you can see your sketch is completely flat it's completely restricted to where that XY plane was so you can't go up above or down below it you're completely stuck on that XY plane now that's perfectly all right in it to be honest in 99.9% at the times that's all you need because when you're creating your 2d sketch you're effectively just drawing a shape you draw in a square drawn a circle and you're then extrude it you then apply a 3d feature to convert that flat 2d sketch into a solid so you draw your circle you extrude it you give it depth you're giving it mass you're creating a solid from a 2d sketch with a three-dimensional sketch however you're not restricted sketching just on one flat surface you can go look down left right you can go above down below and go all over the shop now you think well why why would you want to do that well there's multiple reasons why you'd want to do that you may not ever need to use any you may not come across any of these reasons but think of think of a pipe run for example pipes never just go in a straight line they can't go the point of sauce they go outwards and they might need to go up over an object and turn left then so go down a bit then and to model a pipe in an vendor you can one of many ways is to sketch that profile path the path where the pipe is going to go up down left right all over the place draw a circle and then sweep that circle along the path that's one reason that why is cables this is there's loads of reasons but whatever your reason this is how you do it so I'll get shot on my two-dimensional sketch to create a three dimensional sketch you select the arrow underneath this button here and then you've got to start a 3d sketch and the ribbon bar changes at the top and this is where it starts to become a little bit kind of baffling right well what the hell is a silhouette curve what what's an intersection curve what it doesn't really give you much to go off there's not much guidance here built into the product to let you know what you should be doing if you say off fine well I guess I should be drawing a line you get this sort of triad appear here and you like will find ok you click that and so nothing happens and say well what do I do I don't understand what's going on um ok so a couple of tips to get you started write this bar here this is called precise input it's very useful 1/2 if you don't have this switched on on the draw panel so sneekly hidden away I've got this precise input button here make sure that switched on and that'll give you this precise input still if you've never seen it before you probably looking at it going what the hell is that and that's fine that's fine don't worry about this yet but it will make sense ok I'm gonna press f6 that takes us to isometric view so we've got zip because traditionally Z is up now that's kind of you know the norm sort so it gives us a bit of a basic understanding before we kind of crack on boylan so how do you start with 3d sketching right well I guess it depends where you want to start your lines from where do you want to start sketching from if you do have a blank canvas like I've got here you could start sketching from the center point of the model the center point is where all the axes cross over the x-axis the y-axis and the z-axis where they all intersect that's your center point good place to start would be the center point so you click line you can it click it there it's just that's just a little bit annoying that would be good if you could but you can't just select center point in the browser on the left hand side and then your line will start from that center point now if you were to just start randomly click and willy-nilly you're going to get nowhere you're going to have a sketch that all over the shopping you don't want to do that you want to be a bit more precise about it and that's where the precise input comes into it there's two ways you can be precise about how you get your 3d sketching down the easiest and most convenient way of doing it is to look at this triad now you've got three planes on the triad which are extremely difficult to see because they're dead small here's another tip press escape go to the application options of in vendor and the general tab increase the annotation scale to 200 or whatever is comfortable for you but that will double the size of all the on-screen triads and prompts and botton up so the Triads just that little bit big enough you can maybe see bear now you've got these they're three planes to play with okay so when you start your line command off select the center point you can then pick one of these planes now that will restrict your lines to be drawn purely in that plane you'll get this little grid access thing come up and you can then go up down left right and you're purely restricted to that plane now you have anything like it I could have done that in the 2d sketch why do I want to do a 3d sketch then be restricted to just one plane well you can switch it after you've drawn each line segment so say for example this particular line is going to be 50 mil let's just say 50 millimeters long move the arrow up until you see the horizontal or the vertical constraint appear again I'm pointing at the screen there you can see my own but you can it but that will say that your line is going to be constrained vertically upwards on that z axis then click and you can then right click and select ok you've now got a line which is 50 millimeters up in the z axis you can then if you want just so you've got you know you've got a good starting point a good reference for sizing you can then put a dimension on there and say well that's now 50 mil great how would you carry on with this well select the line again and if some bizarre reason the Triads now down there I think that's because that's where we finished the line and when I made it 50 it got a bit bigger so you can then just select the select the line button and then move the mouse over the green dot which is there and that's where the end of your line is so you're effectively snapping to the end point of the line great you can then use these planes again to say well now I want to go this way in the x-axis so you can then select this plane here and then you can go this way and then you can go that way and then you can go that way you're completely restricted to the light of the axes of this plane if you want to change it you can then select this plane here and now you can go down and across and up and across you can do you can you can then switch between all the planes you can go in any which way you want once you've completed that and you finished you can then go back to the dimension tool and start putting some dimensions on here but be careful if you've placed too many lines and then you dimension them afterwards it starts did started jumping all over the place you start to you know distort the sketch of it things start kind of going a bit out of control but you know do it one small bit at a time so that's one way of doing your 3d sketch another way of doing it is to utilize better this precise input start your line command select the Senate point and then understand the x y&z chord if you want a line to go up in the z-axis you just want it to go vertically up by 50 mil you can say well okay I'm going nowhere on the X because you know that is the X direction here so we're going nowhere in the x0 press tab we're going no way in the Y Direction zero press tab but we'll go in 50ml in the z axis press return now you've got a line upwards of 50 mil now if you want to come 50 mil in the x-axis you would go well okay I'm going 50 mil in the X I'm going nowhere no Y and I'm going nowhere in the Zed now you are if you want to combine them you might want to go say 30 mil in the Y but 10 open the Zed so you're kind of going up on an incline you could then say this is 0 on the X comma but I said maybe 30 and then Ken and Zed then you kind of go up and along at the same time so that's that's another way you can do you your 3d sketching but like I said be very careful about drawing too many lines without dimensions because when you start placing dimensions it starts pushing your sketch around so dimension here 50 mil if you change that a 40 it starts you know because this lines under constraint it's going to start distorting to suit the dimensions that you're placing higher however another tip if you're not too fussed about placing the accurate dimensions on there because you know you sketch that using precise input as it is right there it is correct you can then finish your lines in the constraint tab press fix and then just fix the lines just say look I don't care about the numbers I know they're right I know that's 50 mil and I know that's 30 along and turn up just fix it it's now fully constrained and you can then use that 3d sketch to do a sweep to do whatever you want maybe that is the send line of a pipe and you want to carry on to create the sweep great so in basic terms that's the 3d sketching now you can if this is for a pipe run or if it is for a wire or a cable or something like that you can do water bends as well you could it's all it's like a fill it you can either ask inventor to create bends as you're sketching when you create in the line if you right-click you've got the auto Bend option here so when you do two lines it will automatically create a bend in between them of five mil or whatever this variable is set to you can do it that way alternatively after you finished creating the lines and you've just got the harden eighty degree right angles there you can go to the Bend say let's say to milk and then hover your cursor over the two lines and then just put that to milk and on the lines simple enough in it and bad it's not that bad at all okay once the 3d sketch is completely click finish sketch and your 3d sketch is then appearing in your browser as a three-dimensional sketch now if you zoom around you can see that that sketch is in fact 3d it's not restricted to one plate is going up along and then in another direction you can then do whatever you need to do to create this sweep I guess if you're a bit confused about how you would do that I suppose should probably follow it up we're playing on their to their students sketch on that work plane draw yourself a circle which it's probably not easy to see when you're looking straight on like that then go five mill and then number seven pharmacy - milk finish that sketch sweep that circle along that path you've got something that kind of looks like a pipe okay a couple of other things you can do inside three sketching couple of the other op the other options that are there which you might be thinking about oh I can't go over the more kind of don't have time I've talked too much already as it is and it'll go on for a bit too long if I cover them all but let's just say let's just create a cylindrical solid any size and any dimensions I am NOT first okay so there's a cylindrical solid now what I'm going to also do is create a sketch which is going to be offset from say that plane there mmm 20 ml okay so just for clarity I'm sketching yeah about 20 ml from the center of the cylinder and I'm going to create a random line say let's just look straight onto a know exactly where I'm sketching let's say about about that that'll do and let's this is there'll be a reason which will become apparent soon loss and why I'm doing this let's make that 79 okay so go to 70 ml line in the middle of nowhere kind of offset from a cylinder Neil what the hell are you doing this for well if I go back into 3d sketching I can then say to an vendor project to surface Ron okay project the surface if you select this cylinder and then select this little red R here the curves curves is again just bizarre terminology intentionally let it confuse you let's select that line and then say R up to the surface it takes that line and it wraps it around the surface of the solid directly in front that's project to surface now the reason I made that line 17 along is just for verification that is taken that line and is erupted like for like one to one around that cylindrical surface so if we do measure at loop select this line here it's exactly 17 L and then what do you do next well these this word plane in this line here they're effectively construction jewelry so I can take them and hide them and then we can go back to our cylinder what do you do with this what can I do that well again we're playing pick the end of the point pick that line it creates a work plane normal to the end point of the 3d sketch I can then say make a 2d sketch on that work plane press f7 to slice the graphics tight project the geometry of well I need to draw a circle on the endpoint of this 3d sketch so is it going to give me yep it is draw a circle just just doing this really quickly so I'll do finish the sketch and then sweep that along that path and then you get you know something like that which you would probably not be making a solid you probably going to be cutting and you get something like that you know I'm going to come on you're not going to do that in in production but you kind of get the gist of what that is intended for another thing we can do for just undo all of these and keep my work play not delete my sketch there's me working gone I hidden it didn't I did okay if I sketch on this work plane and I draw a let's just do a spline let's do a very approximate spline something like that that'll do doesn't finish the sketch I'm going to extrude this spline I'm going to extrude the spline as a surface but I want to go that way now my surface that I've just extruded intersects that solid but what why what can I do with it now well what you can then do is go into the 3d sketch environment and then say created intersection curve between the solid and the surface and then wherever the two intersect it's going to create a sketch line you can then use that sketch line as a sweet path it's kind of broken off the bottom now the surface needed to be raised a bit and in mind you can use that as a sweet path for for anything you can split the solid with it Barb's you can do whatever you want with it but that's that's what the intersection curve does that surface and the I guess what you were normally using the 3d sketch which is the line you can also do helical curves as well where you can input pitch and revolution that it's kind of self-explanatory that will just give you a kind of curvy helical coil type line and yeah so that's that's 3d sketching or as much as I can cover in a video on YouTube I guess but hopefully you found that useful if you did please press like it helps get my videos around I'm just getting started and I'd like to make some more if they do become popular so I put some comments in the video below if there's anything else you want to see anything else you want to learn I'll view the comments and I'll get back to you all with any feedback and new videos that I'm going to create thank you very much and thanks

Channel: Tech3D

Views: 262,343

Rating: 4.8948951 out of 5

Keywords: Autodesk, Inventor, 3D Sketch, 3D Sketching, Sketch, 2D, 3D, Part, Model, Solidworks, Guide, Tutorial, Training, Windows, Best Practice, tips and tricks, 2015, 2014, 2016

Id: LkxBLZ1VAlA

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 12 2014