How to Create Common Complex Surfaces inside Inventor | Autodesk Virtual Academy

hey good morning everyone welcome to out of this virtual academy brought to you by qatif Technologies I'm Nigel I'm byuk here one of the excuse me customer success managers here at qatif and today I'm joined by my colleague brian michael cusack hopefully I pronounced your name correctly yes you did awesome so Brian is one of the application engineers CSM's here on the team as well who started out in working primarily in fusion 360 made your way into all the other products that we sell as well and today we're gonna be going into inventor specifically Brian yes we're into the surface modeling and inventor and some of the common scenarios that people run into and they need service Melling to help fix that sure and so service modeling I guess they're just another way to model more I would say organic shapes was the time in inventor you have a very specific dimension you want to make something right like I need this to be exactly three and a quarter inches and it needs to have these edges and so on and so forth and surveys a little bit different right your freedom yeah exactly you people like parametric modeling like Nigel was describing for having a defined amount and having a lot of control over your models knowing exactly what the dimensions are you gotta let loose a little bit with the freeform and surface modeling just in general not only an inventor but any surface modeling tools kind of I like to use the analogy is like oh it's like engineers versus architects engineers new designs actually what something is whereas like architects which are also designers of some sort right they they care more about the aesthetics and they don't really care if it's like five point seven to four inches that's like not an exact in you know that's not something that we can get a solid fraction of but maybe that's just what looks the best so we're gonna go over how to do some of that in Inventor itself I know that sometimes people need to create some of these organic shapes especially when working with consumer products say for example this mouse hopefully you can see that right this is not something that's easily drawn parametric's I wouldn't do it so so yeah all right you wanna take it away sounds good will do all right I'm gonna use that mouse now so the purpose of today's webinar is to you know discover some invented tools that you might not know as possible maybe something newer in the tool that from the last time you service modeling and also to overcome common surface modeling obstacles like I mentioned I want to go over to some scenarios that people run into and they're trying to go overcome these hurdles with surface modeling it doesn't have to necessarily be freeform every time it can be some of the surfacing tools that inventor also has so here's our agenda today the first one being showing the combination of surface bodies with parametric bodies you don't necessarily need to have surface bodies for the entire model all the time and that's sometimes that's the case but sometimes you want to combine it with parametric bodies and get the best of both worlds we also want to go into these surface tools and if you get a model that does have these surfaces and you want to repair them or you want to fill them up I'll show you guys how to do that will show quickly how to using a specific tool and inventor how to turn a mesh body into surfaces that you can work with and edit and lastly I want to create a water faucet and show you guys how I approach a new design and how I go about thinking about how to tackle it you don't just dive right into some of these models sometimes you can take a step back and take a look at okay from the tools I know how am I going to create this particular body and sometimes it's harder than others but so I'm going to show you a regular example today and the tips and tricks that come along with that so let's go into the first example is combining surface bodies with the pair metrics I've shown the water nozzle head before and I shown how to to create something a little bit more complex like this of a surface that you don't necessarily can get from a simple sweep or revolve or something like that this is something that's a little bit more unique to surface modeling and if you try to accomplish the water nozzle head where the water shoots out of by creating like a cylinder for example for that head you wouldn't be able to necessarily perfectly define I guess you can right here um but you wouldn't necessarily have as much parametric control as you had one so it's not always the best case to use only surface modeling in this case it might work out for this but if you want to go back later and maybe change and you want to define maybe they headed this because it connects with a particular part of the nozzle that's out there in the field that's exactly like four inches in diameter for example you can't really control it at this level here maybe you can go and increase the edges and that will give you some control there but would but since this is a pretty parametric body what we can do instead is add a parametric model to or just a simple circular extrusion to it because in here you can you know create a dimension for it and you could reference that with parameters and things like that of course they did not hit okay after that six enter there we go so you still you can even now you have the ability to create the the dimensions of that for that of course and still confuse parametric features like the fill it tool to to kind of organically connect the two together so just a simple example just wanted to show you guys that you don't necessarily want to go with freeform modeling all the time but you can still connect it to in a fluid way there the next example I wanted to go into is fixing surface tools or surfaces that have holes in them and things like that and we're going to go into a little bit of the different patch options as well so let's go back to inventor here so take this hammer for example that might be familiar to some of you guys so we have these holes here at the top of the hammer that don't necessarily cut off perfectly cleanly they come off to the surface and if you try to create a sketch of the bottom of this and then try to fill it up with a project you try to fill up the hole this way there's no way you can ever get a perfect surface for that hole you can maybe try the two surface but I've actually tried that on this and it wasn't here's the window right here you try to do it there but it's not really recognizing it so a way you can go about filling this hole up if that's your objective here is you can use the surface column here and you can use the patch tool now this window popped up here that gives us once we select the edge of the hole we want a patch it gives us different options to filling up this hole we can use either the free condition solution tangent condition or smooth condition and these are represented by G 0 G 1 and G 2 and those are just fancy surface modeling terminology essentially there are different solutions to fixing these holes and I have more of that on the slide that we showed earlier of at a high level how these interact so at the lowest level is there free condition G 0 and that's how it's gonna fix it here and it's represented by this translucent orange surface here the surface doesn't have any thickness or anything to it yet but it does fill the hole up so and it adheres to the rest of us the surface there and to really fill the hole in we go to use the scope tool which adds the material needed between the different bodies so I'm gonna go ahead and select that surface there it's gonna give us a green representation of what it's going to do and after using that it actually made it go away completely so that just goes to show that that tool that a free condition g0 option was the way to go to fix this hole if we went with for example if you wanted to patch this hole and we went with the tangent condition and tried using the scope tool that leaves kind of like the edge there even though it looks pretty good to the naked eye it's not completely perfect maybe not the best best solution like the one that we did before it so choose between the three different options you have play around with and see which one works for you for your solution and lastly I want to do another patch on this one here but instead of choosing one of these or will choose a free condition option but instead of using sculpt to fill it in maybe we can use something like the thickness store thicken tool and since this is a surface that doesn't have any thickness yet we can click on the thicken tool click on the surface and we can either tell it to go a hundred thousandth of an inch up or just thousands like an inch down maybe to plug it in like a cork or something like that or we can do a combination of sculpt tools and things like that since this is the hole that goes directly down but I just wanted to give you guys the option and the idea of not only just using sculpt and patch but maybe using things like the patch in thicken tool if this is what you're trying to achieve there right so back to the PowerPoint these are the the different different G 0 G 1 G twos that we're talking about here tools like alias which is another Autodesk product goes deeper into the G 3s and things like that and they're more flexible in terms of surface Molly yep yeah if you're modeling like a car or something the industry standard in that point is alias alias alias goes into g3 which is even further than g2 and regrets the computation so that's something you need to look at and there's there's tools to do it yeah sudden leading to this next slide here I put an X over this very complex STL body because its inventors not meant to to create these very organic like surfaces or deal with them as much or editing them in reverse engineering this it can handle better it's better to handle things like this that are STL bodies I just wanted to show you your options and where you should not even waste your time trying to reverse engineer something like this maybe leave that to something more like alias or even maybe fusion 360 to an extent I have a video an AV a on the reverse engineering of one of the those STL bodies in fusion but here in inventor I did want to show a tool that that can turn this STL body here on the left quickly into surfaces and then to freeform body so for people who don't know what it feels on Brian you want to go yeah sure so an STL body is like a dumping excusing is a dumb body like you see here with a bunch of triangular components to it and it's not something that has any sketches or any editable parts per say edible to an extent for regular 3d modeling packages so they're dumb bodies that people like to send to other people to kind of protect the integrity of their data and its limits people from from taking that data and making changes to adhere to what they're trying to make so for example I have this STL body here that I can't just go in here and change the diameter or something there's no sketches or anything involved with it but what I can do is use this tool right here to turn it into at least a surface that I can then go in and edit so if I hit fit mesh face and I choose maybe some of these triangles here and maybe some over here it created this green a representation of a surface of what it's going to create for me which is very very closely accurate to the triangles that I selected in addition I'm gonna select some down below here and now it detected the entire cylindrical clinical shape here I'm gonna hit apply and once I hide the STL body we can see that orange representation back there I did want to create one more down below here as well so like some of those surfaces to get the ground about I don't have to select the whole thing just a couple is suffice there and the there's some tolerancing involved so it's not a hundred percent the surface STL body but it's pretty darn close for what I'm trying to achieve here now if I go in here and hide the visibility of the STL body you can see these surface representation these are translucent right now by default I can turn them into something that you can see a little bit more clearly here so just by the click of a button I was able to transform that STL body into these surfaces here and to add even further to this example I wanted to show the conversion of this solid or these not solid surface bodies that are not solid into a free-form surface by going to convert and so those services they have just to reiterate to what Brian just said those services have no thickness yeah no thickness represented by these orange cubes here so now I'm going to turn these solid or sorry these surfaces into the four surfaces that still don't have thickness but there are freeform bodies or preformed surfaces that can be used for manipulation represented by these purple color here so let me go ahead and hide those surfaces that I used and I'm going to show that now we have a free-form saw surface that we can do things like edit form and manipulate so from a dumb stl body that we couldn't handle before we can do anything with before to you know freeform surfaces that we can manipulate it's it's a pretty powerful combination of tools at the top there and then you can use like other tools to be able to make that yeah and then we can make that applause later on exactly alright so now we're lastly we're gonna go into creating this faucet water faucet here this is where I talked about wanting to take a step back and take a look at how you want to approach this for the head where the water comes out here that's pretty straightforward it can actually be achieved with something like a sweep but I do want to show some tips and tricks if you did it with the freeform modeling because you didn't essentially need to know those tips and tricks when you get dive deeper into this I've seen some faucets where like a sweep would be a terrible idea to build depending on like how fancy you want to get precision yeah yeah and freeform you can make the base of the thought the water faucet like thicker and then it kind of next in bottlenecks in and then it kind of expands a little bit again that's what you get for freedom exactly yeah and if you see the handles here for the hot and cold excusing typically when you look at it you think okay this is a little bit more complicated that's when you want to use some free for modeling and I wanted to divide this into two different approach to different solids the first one in the red is a sewing cylinder that in freeform that goes up and it's just vertical a vertical cylindrical freeform model the one going horizontal I once you represented as another cylindrical shape kind of like a bowling pin if you see that there and then combining the two using one of their freeform combination commands like the bridge command so that's how I would want to approach this looking at this this is at a very high level of how you would want to approach something like this but for the the new I for someone who's never done it before it might be a little bit overwhelming they might have just started here and tried to branch to the other model but you can create two separate models and bring them together it might be an easier approach alright so we'll start with the base here and we'll go straight into the cylinder design or to the cylinder freeform tool and we'll start creating the where the water comes out of the faucet and I'm going to uncap that here to make this something more easily editable than having it capped that's just a preference there but there's an option for you guys and now I've shown this before in the past if you've seen one of my older surface modeling videos or I double-click the two selected the top surface is there sorry I'm sooo mning in in and out here and then I hold alt on my keyboard this window pops up as well I hold alt on my keyboard to add more material to this model clicking drag and drag and then once you get to a certain point you can angle it and then pulled out click and drag angle it hold bolt click and drag then you can just do that process again you can use a sweep command for this but if you're trying to expand or or turn around this [Music] this water faucet in a particular way then then that's then this would be the better tool for it all right and the more time you spend with surface modeling from my experience the better hopefully the better it'll look sometimes you get into a an ugly surface model and you're just like what did I just create that's that's normal it's that's how it starts beginning with surface modeling for sure and this isn't the perfect obviously the perfect faucet here but I wanted to show you this example so then I can show you how to fix something that's not as clean as this so first off you select the whole model and maybe some of these are closer together this is actually pretty evened out but if they are close together and giving you these kind of like abrupt turns maybe using something like the make uniform tool here it helps to spread it apart if you're stuck in a little bump along the road try this try double highlighting the whole thing and make it uniform it didn't change much there because they're pretty spread out but if these were closer together then it'll help help to alleviate that let me do that insert an edge or two you're here just to emphasize that a little bit it's like the whole thing make uniform it just spread those two apart I don't want those they're something take this out all right and then the next the second thing I wanted to show to fix this which will do 90% of the heavy lifting here is toggling smooth now we can see in a box boxing more environment how this model is or how these surfaces are created it's it's base with these as a skeleton in the background these box shapes for the the surfaces here so what I like to tell people when when working with this box environment here is to try to get these as uniform as possible you can see that right here it starts to tail off and turn right there you want to play around with this to make us uniform and nice and even and flowy if he may so I'm gonna so this is where people get a little uncomfortable they they like to stick with the the control that they have over the parametric models but if you have some organic models that you just absolutely need to create using tools like this then you have to get used to it get comfortable with using these types of approaches all right so that's a rough the but like I said the more time you spend with it the better the outcome is going to be one more move here and then let's see what it looks like in the smooth environment again so it's getting there it's almost there but you guys get the idea you want to switch between the environments to get there now when I get out of there it's represented by this surface with no thickness again we can use things like patch 2 to close off the edges here and stitch to start to make it a a solid body and there we go so now we have that part created now let's create the handle part or which if you recall I said we want to create with two different features here we wanted to create it with the the cylinder going vertically in the cylinder going horizontally so I'll create the one going vertically first and that I'm going to add some height to it and add some actually leave the height the same but I'll add some faces to it I can do it here before going into the model so maybe a couple of them right there and then I wanted to add a maybe another one because it gets a little bit more complex so the more complex the the geometry of the of the surface the more I would recommend creating more faces there so you can have more control over it and then according to the looks of the old or of the other faucet that had the handles I had this part be a little bit more narrow at the top kind of reminded me of like a mushroom this part double-clicking selects the whole edges this part kind of narrowed in more and that one even more alright and then maybe crease the bottom to align with the the part of the the faucet that connects there and so we're pretty much done with the first part of the the handle then the second part let's go ahead and create the plane to create it on here's the second cylinder let's give a rough estimation for that and drag it towards it and add some faces all right I'll make it a little bit more ergonomic here and then to connect the two together Oh actually wanted sorry I actually wanted to create this in the other environment here let me just go in too so I can connect the two together all right so I'll create the cylinder here and the beginning you might not be terribly fast with it and that's okay it just takes practice to to get the hang of knowing how each tool behaves and things like that all right so do the same thing edit form and I'm going to add some of that economics to it and then to the end here we're gonna delete some of these faces as well as some of the faces on here I'm gonna hide this plane and then we can use something like the bridge command to connect the two so I'm going to select those series of edges this series of edges and maybe connect the two like that I don't really like the way that looks let me get this a little bit more narrow you like and none of these times is Brian actually inputting any real numbers if you measure this afterwards I guarantee you it's gonna be - like v 2 v significant digit and engineers will start to cringe because they're like I don't know exactly how big that is like I've seen it yeah like that what is that point seven nine six three zero it's like yeah no one's ever gonna input that number but uh yeah so just a different way of thinking when you're modeling like this and I think it's just something that people have to get used to when trying to do this and I think if you're in like consumer electronics or consumer you know consumer products this is something that you kind of deal with on a regular basis so yeah and then again going back into toggle to toggle into the box mode you want to get this as uniform as possible like I mentioned earlier so like this is something that drastically sticks out of the model so I definitely want to bring that down a little bit because then you get like those weird humps and stuff in your model yeah and then I don't want it looks definitely looks interesting for lack of a better word just I like that yeah I want to be I don't want to hurt my feelings too much my design here but the more time you spend online like I mentioned the cleaner you can make the model because you can hop between different modes and you say you can see oh this is looking as as clean of a cut as I want it to be and to reduce the amount of work you're doing it to make it more accurate you want to use things like the symmetry tool which is right here so I can make this side and this side there so everything on the left side could be the same as the right side so to help make it even and nice and let's see what it looks like there I could spend some more time on it but that's the idea and I have a model that I've already done here that I spent a little bit more time on and I was able to you know now we can start adding some fancy colors to it and things like that and then even start rendering it per se and to get it to it's important to see what its gonna look like for surface modeling because to look nice and that's like the whole purpose of it so you want to definitely bring it into ray-tracing mode and take a look at what its gonna look like in real life so that may be the difference between a parametric model and and service falling is you want to take a look at the kriti nosov it afterwards all right turn the ray tracing off before you uh before I go back so it doesn't harvest my resources here so that's what I had for you guys today I hope some of it was helpful at least and again we had I had surface following videos from the pass on the other ABS that go deeper into the grips I showed earlier and it goes into something like the water faucet the head of it maybe a I think I created like a lamp or something before so definitely check those out if you want to see other examples of surface modeling videos absolutely thanks Brian for showing us some stuff and surfacing today and inventor something that a lot of people think they need actually another application to do and when people get files from other people they come into services they get a lot how do i how do I mess with this we've all to surface so you got a couple of options yeah now do you want most of the times people like I just want to make that a solid why did I even get into the surface in the first place well sometimes people want to protect their their their IP right the intentional property and they don't want to give you the inventor model per se for the sake of having people not take their stuff right so that's some of the reasons why people get sent surface models or STL's or steps or ideas and things like that so cool we'll just hop into questions here but before I do that actually a little jump straight in let me go take a look cool and so Hendricks asking his STL format used mostly for 3d printing and file exchange is used in step files yes STL's are used for 3d printing yes [Music] yeah there you go and a lot of slicers take STL's it's not all of them it's very common file type and it is used for other things like we mentioned earlier protecting integrity of your data and it's a it's a just like I said it's a common file format yeah so like when people do file exchange they still leave they'll still use stuff like that you know they'll still use STL file step files or they'll dump it down even further and use I wouldn't say it's primarily meant for three printing I think it would pick him out before 3d printing I think so it's so he just happens to be the file type that slicers take the easiest exactly so it just happens to be synonymous with that right so dimensioning service models so the same thing right these models have dimensions right the solid has a dimension so when you go into the the drawing environment right and this is question from Scott so when you go to the dry environment you do the same thing right you you've dimension edges where you dimension two points if those things exist on the model so it's it's the same workflow to be able to dimension those things a lot of the time when it goes to like manufacturing and stuff you don't send them like you don't send them a dimensioned drawing of this faucet for example right maybe the only dimensions you really care about is like how far the Centers of the handles are to the center of the spigot right you don't necessarily need to know how long the handle is because most likely that handle is going to be manufactured in some other way whether that's you know you make a mold out of it and do it in like plastic or something or you cast it or whatever so yeah generally don't need to so and if you want to send it to say for example like what do you do with sending to your suppliers right you ask those like well what do you need sometimes the suppliers need the negative of that so they can you know make their molds out of it yeah in this case you would send them the model it sounds like so then they they can make the mold most the time you don't send a 2d drawing of service model yeah it just doesn't make sense a lot of the time right so because then you don't reap the benefits of the model right because if you look at it is like anterior-posterior and from the front you're not gonna get the same thing that you get from like a traditional manufacturing drawing unless they're they are perfectly they have perfect grade ii eyes and perfect diameters if they don't which they know yeah or else you just build it and sweeps and it'll be way more accurate to the numbers you want and stuff like that so it's just a different way to think let's see is there a right is this the right way to convert STL models which have specific dimensions um okay so for the way we're trying to do yeah the example I showed you you can essentially draw like parametrically under or into the STL you don't have to necessarily hit the convert button like I did because the when I hit the convert button it gives us the diameter of it but it's not necessarily a perfect perfect circle like Parekh like parametric modeling yes if that makes sense yeah it's really as tails doesn't yeah yeah it depends on what you're trying to do [Music] the reason that people send STL models is so people can't reverse engineer this stuff and so if you're trying to they make it as difficult as possible um to do it it's just yeah so it depends what we're trying to do with the model there's ways to manipulate it and there's ways to get a very close approximation as to what the original model was but it's likely that if you just use some of these simple methods of being able to convert it you're not gonna get it like for example when Brian showed that helmet there's no way in Inventor that you're gonna be able to convert that and get that information so there's actually a generator design calibrate yeah can you convert your whatever six significant feature six significant figure diameter service model into a more standard dimension sure you like when you edit the form and you edit that diameter you can put the number in so if you wanted to change it from some number that's not exactly a quarter inch or an eighth of an inch or something you can manually type that in on like the the diameter or something yeah yeah like the bottom of the the faucet handles for example I put exactly 0.5 radii and so that's what it was gonna be but as I went further into the design it the top parts of it you don't you don't necessarily define it in the particular with any particular dimension it so yeah I mean like so it makes a lot of sense for people who sostiene to you generate the drawing then tweak it no you don't generate the drawing then tweak it you do it if you want to do it you do it on the model yeah you do it in the model though the context of the model because the drawings gonna get the exact number unless you change a significant figure on the dimensions on the drawings to only go to three sigfigs then that's let's see so John's yeah so he's asking like how do i what do I do with scanned outputs like point clouds and stuff so it's a little bit different it really depends on what you're trying to do with the point cloud a lot of people there's two I guess two ways to work with point clouds is you want to generate a model of the as-built or you're taking a point cloud of like a facility and you need to work around that so there's tools like Navisworks and stuff they can help with the second one you just import the point cloud you can import the point led into a better and then work around that space and then use something like Navisworks for the clash attention and then but if you need to do like it say for example you do a scan of like a physical component and you need a 3d model of that you generally wouldn't create a parametric model of the 3d model of that you you would generate a STL of that and then work with that file so it really depends on where you're trying to do if we had a little bit more understanding of exactly why your workflow looks like we can let you know what the best way to do it is but it's it's kind of limiting sometimes yeah if you got a straight a sale model and you're trying to make it parametric and it's a parametric cut type of model I would recommend measuring it and knowing the dimensions of it and building it parametrically rather than converting it with the surface if you want to talk about it shoot us email we'd have a conversation about what you're trying to do and then go about that so so let's know well I think that's it as per the questions Brian anything else next or in February here in next month I guess they're on the third Wednesday for those streamlined streamlined subscribers there is the vault data loading productivity training so that's a four hour vault data loading ABA yep yeah but that's a big deal right because sometimes when we implement vaults are people are employing their vaults it becomes a challenge as to how to clean up their data to go into that system correctly exactly and and we'll be showing best practices as well absolutely and you can ends live so you guys can ask questions so if you're a stream excuse me streamlines subscriber then you can li joined that I will be sending you or if you want the link I can definitely send that over to you to join if you're a streamline subscriber if you want to to see what it's about just I suggest as well and we can talk to you more about that productivity training absolutely and and that kind of brings up a conversation I had with somebody yesterday well it's like hey we have all of this data and we have like eight duplicates we have duplicates upon duplicates about duplicates in our like shared folder so how do I put that in the vault I'm like well you have to do like a small cleanup process right to be able to like if the analogy I use is like whatever you put in is what you get out of it so if you put trash in you'll get trash out so you want to put clean data and that's what we're gonna show people out to do so well oh yeah thanks again Brian for every other day going over all of this I know it's definitely a different way of thinking for a lot of people who build maybe industrial machinery I suppose to consumer products but for those of you who you know delve into that space every once in a while it's definitely something to good to know I just know that the application can do some of these things even if you don't use them very often exactly thanks for having me absolutely so with that we're gonna let everybody go we'll see you all next week same time same place we're gonna be going over some different stuff next week actually we're gonna be going over as this tool I believe so simulation so cool let's uh let's let everybody go and we'll see y'all next week bye bye take care guys

Channel: KETIV Technologies

Views: 1,541

Keywords: autodesk, akn_include, autodesk virtual academy, manufacturing, cam, cad, designs, math, inventor, autodesk inventor, complex surfaces, surfaces in inventor, surface tools, parametric bodies, ava, complex surfaces inside inventor, how to create surfaces in inventor, ketiv ava, ketiv academy, ketiv autodesk academy, autodesk software, ketiv technologies, autodesk academy, ava academy, whats new in inventor, computer aided design, mechanical engineering, autodesk inventor tutorial

Id: iOKdVUF81ak

Length: 42min 25sec (2545 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020