How to Sweep | Autodesk Inventor

sir welcome to deify can tips we're looking at sweep today that's this button here what does it do and why haven't I done this already in the two years since I've been doing tutorials I don't know evidently haven't I thought I had anyway sweep is an alternative to extrude in a kind of way whereas extrude takes a profile square circle and then creates a solid in a straight line sort of straight up from that profile sweep creates a 3d object by taking that profile and then sweeping it along a path so in order for sweep to work you need two things you need a profile sketch and you need a path sketch so you need two sketches like this right so typical examples of a suite there isn't any so you will use a sweep for this and you will for that oh but not for this not that there isn't any kind of guidelines really it depends on what it is you want to create but some good examples are things like wires cables tubes pipes those sort of things there rods rod a cumuli could be an extrusion but it's anything that sort of you know like Wyatt cables and pipes now you know you know what I mean so you need two things like I said profile on the path so let's create sketch let's drop a sketch on the XY plane and let's create a control vertex spine and go dink dink dink and dink okay right that's our path so we're going to sweep a circle along this line so instead of the circle just going in a straight line it's going to follow this path so that's our path and if you want to be anal about it you can rename that to path right the next thing now you need to do is to create your profile on the a it doesn't have to be but it massively helps if your profile is on the end of the sweet path like attach to the end of it it massively helps it's good practice to get in you now there's a couple of tips that you can that you can use here just to make sure that it's perfectly in sync always and if you path ever move so that your the end point moves with it and your profile moves with it and everything's in tandem so one of those tips is to create a work plane and then instead of sort of randomly placed in the work planes instead of guessing in taking measurements attached your work plane to the end of the path so click plane click the endpoint of your path and then click your path and then that creates a work plane perfectly normal to the path itself so what happens now is if I grab the end of this path and move it and then click update that word plane will follow the end of the path and will always be normal so if I draw a circle on this plane central to that dot the circle is always perfectly normal to that path and you'll never get that sort of skewed effect when you're sweeping it along the path another tip as well this isn't massively important at all but it's just one of those OCD things that I always do this purple side of the work plane now you can check out my work plane video I'll link it up here the purple side of the work plane is the negative side of the work plane and the orange side of the work plane is the positive side now I always prefer the orange side to be away from the path so I'll just right-click on the work plane and then flip the normal and then that flips it around so the negative sides over here and the positive sides here so then we're going to create a sketch on that plane and then what you want to do is create a do a project geometry and then project the end of the line so then that that burns the endpoint of the path onto this sketch so when you create your circle you snap it to that line so if that path does move your profile is attached to that path using projected geometry so that again massively helps never going to say make this I don't know if this is all obviously completely situational wherever the diameter is that you wanted to be so let's just say 3 you do need to be careful about the bend if that circle is too big to Bender on there so if it's so if it's self-intersect saz it's bending around then the swoop will fail so you need to make sure that the circle isn't too big or the bends on too tight click finish sketch we've now got a profile we've now got a path we can turn the work plane off and then we can say sweep and because we've only got two things in this part file all we have is a profile in a path invent is sort of intelligent enough to go well I'm assuming you want to use both those together and then it'll do just that there's a couple of things you can change in here you can say you know you can have a surface instead of a solid metal create like a thin walled surface instead of s body but it in most cases you want to create a solid the profile orientation is always going to be in line with the path you can also say make it parallel but in this case that's just not going to work it's just going to create sort of this flat effect as it goes through because it's always it's keeping the profile at that angle as its sweeping along so that that circle isn't sort of bending with the with the path but in most cases you're going to want it to do that and you can also put a taper on it as well so you can say you know get larger as it's sweeping along the path and that's done on a degrees basis which in most cases unless you're an absolute genius mathematician is going to be trial and error but we'll come to a purple there is a point where it just gets absolutely ludicrous but we'll stick that at zero and then click OK and then there's your sweep all done if you want to change it at any point you can find the sweep feature in the browser expand it and then you can say right well I want to change the path so you can double click your path sketch and then we can sort of drag that up here we can do whatever we want with it and because our work plane is attached to the end the work plane will move with the end of the path and then that means this sketch profile will move with the end of the path and everything is always absolutely perfect and that's really good for sort of in progress designs that you know conceptual designs where you're not quite sure where things are going to go and you're going to need to drag them around and you don't want to have to completely rebuild features as you're doing it they'll always stay up to date right there's a couple of other things that we can that we can do with sweep now I've got a pre-prepared sketch or a pre-prepared part that I can use for a couple of these examples so if we go to sweep yes we can click our profile and yes we can click our path but we've also got this type drop-down here where we can say I want to use a guide rail as well so we can select a path which is that line there and then we can also pick a guide rail and a guide rail is a third sketch so this is when you need three sketches for a sweep select the guide rail a little arrow here and then you can select that third sketch now notice how this guide rail is attached to the profile again that is really important that needs to be the case but as it's sweeping this profile along this path it will follow this line as a guide rail and you can see what it's doing there it's fine prout the the profiles blending and it's morphing along that guide rail as it's being swept along the line and it's doing that in the X and the y axes up and then across if you say just the X it will just follow it in one direction and then you can say not as well which is absolutely pointless you might as well have not done it in the first place so we can say X and Y and then click OK and then there's your sweep with a guide for also you using that you can create some quite funky shapes using sweep if you were to use that technique and we can say there there's another one here so I've got glide you can see what this is this is obviously the hand grip for it's a hairdryer obviously so there's a guide rail which is going to be the hand grip so you can say give me that profile give me that path and then I want to use as a guide rail this line here and then you can see what it's going to do there click OK and it's all good now the third option is to follow a path and a guide surface now this one is I wouldn't say this one's all that common but it's just good to see it work so you can kind of know what it can do so what we've got here now I need to do a bit of preparation to get this one to work I've got a profile in here so that little line there is actually a rectangle and I want that I want to sweep that rectangle along the surface of this solid but then I want to follow a line on there as well so what we can do is we can create a 3d sketch and then create an intersection curve between these two here obviously that's completely unrelated to sweep but that gives me a line that's touching that body like that and then what I can do is turn off this surface because I don't need it anymore and then and then we can use a sweep and this time instead of creating jewelry you can use sweep as a cut so I'm going to cut along this path so it's going to create like a cut out along the body following that path but you can see you can see that as it's blending that rectangle along that path it's sort of lifting off the surface so you're not going to get a perfect cut so to fix that you can say follow a guide surface and then pick this solid here and then it's following that see the preview didn't work but you can see it's following that guide service absolutely perfectly it's running the sweep along that path so those are the three different sweep options that you've got the world's your oyster with it you can create literally anything you want as long as you can get the prot the profile and the path tied together make them adaptive to each other using the project geometry yeah you can do all kinds of funky shapes so that's sweet I think that's probably enough as a beginner's guide to getting started on it if you like that please press like subscribe comment all that kind of jars you know usual stuff that people say they own 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Channel: Tech3D

Views: 84,014

Keywords: Autodesk, 3D, Inventor, tips, training, guide, modelling, part, assembly, best practice, Solidworks, AutoCAD, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, Sweep, profile, path, sketch, geometry

Id: PzaiQIUMcg8

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2015