Inventor Relationships: Constraints vs Joints

so today we're going to be taking a look at inventory relationships and uh we're going to be taking a look at the constraint and the joint tools look at some similarities some differences and some of the things that you can do with those so to get started just an introduction you guys have seen me quite a few times on these webinars and uh i got an updated picture of the family there that was actually from emma's birthday it's our first birthday party so we got a one-year-old and kyla in my arms she'll be turning three in about two weeks after a little under two weeks now so we're gonna have a one and three-year-old running around all right so i want to start off today just by looking at a couple quick slides before i do that i do have a couple polls for you though so we're going to start off with our first poll and there's a couple different relationship types that we're going to be looking at they can strain told the assemble tool and the joint tool and our first question here is just wondering which of those tools you guys have used that is multiple choice or a multiple answer as well so you can pick all three of them if you've used all three of them all right got most of you guys have voted looks like somebody's screwing around with me there i'm gonna go ahead and share those results so you can see that 100 of you have used a constraint tool about 38 of you have looked at the assemble tool twenty five percent of the joint tool and the six percent of you are screwing with me unsure by eyeballing them and using the ground option all right let's take a look at the next poll so again this is multiple answers so feel free to pick a few of those but when we're dealing with the constraints for itself just curious if this is the only tool you have used if you've ever had an issue or never have an issue with it a couple general responses there all righty let's take a look at some of these responses a little bit of a surprise here about 35 of this is the only relationship tool that you have used that's about what i expected uh probably the same 35 said it can use some enhancements again i'm surprised that number's not not all the way up but i'm a little bit surprised by that 88 number i have had issues constraining my assembly i'm sure that there have been some but uh i definitely wasn't expecting a number that high so hopefully today we can look at some other options or maybe some little tweaks in there that might help you out with some of those alrighty let's take a look at the next one this one is going to deal with the assemble command so again multiple options there you can pick as many as fit your situation you have used this tool you use it as often as possible you've never tried it or maybe even never heard about it okay let's take a look at some of these responses so just under half of you have used this tool before and the other half has never tried it before and in a small percentage probably about a quarter of you have never heard of this tool before the assemble tool so we'll definitely get to take a look at that one and see how it can help us out what we can do with it and we have one more and this is relating to the joint tool okay look at some of the responses for this one all right so about half of you have used this tool before and even about 14 of you use it as often as possible it's pretty awesome as far as those next three options if you had asked me probably within a couple months ago i probably would have fit into all three of these i never tried it due to lack of effort when i did try it i might have a little trouble understanding what it was looking for or just didn't expect to work as i as i thought it would and that's basically because i was used to constraint tool constraint tool did everything i needed it to do and i didn't really see a need to change there so probably about a couple months ago i was challenged to give it a shot and see what i thought about it so i started taking a look at it and i've used it from time to time there's a couple things that i really really like about it there's other things that i feel like are pretty good but could be a little bit better and then other things i'm just going to stick with the constraint tool for so hopefully taking a look at a couple examples you guys can see exactly what i'm talking about and maybe get some ideas where you can implement the joint tool and the constraint tool side by side in your assemblies so take a look at the constraint tool this is the most common one everybody's used this i'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this dialog box there are a couple things that we will look at once we get to some examples though so first of all dealing with the the different types we have the mates we have the angular the tangent the insert and the symmetry constraint and i'm sure that you've used probably most of those if you're like me you avoid the tangent at all cost never really saw great use for it i'm sure i know there's been times i have used it but try to avoid that one and then of course with each of these there's two different solutions two or three different solutions for for them and uh again a little bit of a preview of common events there's a couple of new tweaks in the 2019 software that i want to show you relating to a couple of these the assemble command so the assemble command it used to be part of the ribbon a few releases back it has actually since been moved and i typically say it's been hidden so it's on it you have to click the relationships bar to see it and then once you start the assemble command you get the mini toolbar like you've seen in that screenshot and this is an advanced version of the constraint tool so it does for the most part just about everything the constraint tool does but the tool itself is going to help you out so instead of choosing a type of constraint so instead of choosing an insert or choosing a mate and then making your selections you start the assemble tool you start picking faces you start picking edges and then based on what your selections are the assemble tool is going to basically determine what the best option for you is and then you get an option to say you know what you decided mate to actually want to flush so you get a little drop down menu there to switch back and forth between them but the idea of this tool is to make your constraining faster by helping you decide which which tool or which constraint type to use based on the selections that you make the joint tool so we have a few different types of joints we have an automatic joint type which is pretty handy again based on your selections just like the assemble command based on your selections it's going to pick the type that i think best represents your situation there's a rigid type which is an extremely handy one and we'll be taking a look at this one this one removes all degrees of freedom between your selections we have the rotational which is going to allow one rotational degree of freedom the slider type which will allow one translational degree of freedom and then we have a cylindrical which specifies one translational and one rotational and the planar which specifies two translational and one rotational degree of freedom and we also have the ball type which best buys three rotational degrees of freedom actually i've never used the ball type before i'm not sure if i ever will but if you take a look at this dialog box the idea is pretty similar to a constraint we have the type that we pick we have our connection options we have alignment options as well uh there's a gap value if you need it and then on the second tab of this dialog box is the limits option where we can assign angular or linear limits for our joints so there's the limits tab so let's switch over to inventor now like i said i don't want to spend a lot of time in powerpoint that's really about all the powerpoints i have until the very end but i want to switch over to inventor and we can start taking a look at some constraints joints building relationships in our assemblies i got a few different examples to show you we'll cover a couple different situations i'll give you some of my my tips and tricks and maybe some best practices you could take a look at as well show you one or two new features that uh are going to pop up in your inventor 29 19 i'm sorry 2019 software so this first one we're taking a look at is my trailer hitch design and i'm sure you guys have seen me use this as a demo before but we want to start taking a look at constraining this building it up together and take a look at a few different situations so the first part of this is going to fit into our our hitch is going to fit into our receiver and that's going to be our first step this is a situation where i'm really still going to probably go with constraints on this i tend to default everything to constraining with origin plans i like to keep all my parts centered on the origin planes and then use those whenever i'm building up constraints if you ask me why the reason is pretty simple if parts ever change if they ever grow in size get larger geometry changes which you know they happen often enough as long as you're using origin planes as long as you're keeping your parts centered pretty good chance that your assembly is going to update just fine and you're not going to have any issues if you start constraining between geometry you run that risk of having to make some tweaks or changes on the assembly side whenever you update a part so let's take a look at a couple here i'm going to start off with my constraint tool and in my constraint tool i'm going to use the origin planes between the hitch and the receiver and i'm going to find that plane first that plane second looks like a mate type works just fine there so i'm going to go ahead and click apply to that one and i'm going to grab the second one click ok i missed that second option maybe i missed the first option there we go got them now click ok and now i'm able to slide this back and forth uh so i need to line up those holes pretty straightforward there i'll stick with the mate type i'll grab the axis and the axis i'm going to go ahead and click okay it's actually giving me a warning and uh this is a pretty good spot to show you guys a new tool or a new feature in the 2019 software i actually didn't intend for that one to break but i get a chance to show you that now so if you take a look at my dialog box here you can see that i have different solution types now whenever i pick axes so those are new in 2019 that might give you one extra step that you have to select there and we'll probably see that option show up a little bit later on too but in this situation i had to switch to a different solution type there so a new option in 2019 when you're doing those axes is being able to flip those constraints i know a lot of us have been waiting for that for a while again we'll see that pop up later on so we'll see that again so that deals with the first part of this so the next thing i want to take a look at is putting down this chrome hitch ball into my design i'm going to go into the joint type for this joint type for this and i'm going to go with a rigid but right before i do that i did want to talk about maybe how i would go about doing this if i was dealing with constraints so if i was dealing with constraints i would probably go with an insert type probably select that edge select that edge and i have to do a flip there and then click okay and i get my part in there still have a rotational degree of freedom to deal with if you want to make sure everything's locked down so that would be a separate constraint type i'm going to undo that and we're going to take a look at this rigid type constraint which i'm really really a fan of lately a rigid type constraint it works pretty much the same way as the insert in this situation i'll grab that edge i'll zoom in i'll grab that edge in that center point it's going to lock it down into place a little bit of an animation there which i could turn off around and i'm going to go ahead and click ok for that and that's completely locked into place i actually don't need to worry about the rotational degree of freedom on that guy because the rigid is going to handle it when we're taking a look at this pin i do want to show you another option that popped up in 2019 on the insert constraint so on the constraint tool insert and i select my edge and i select my edge let's flip that around first of all one of the problems with the insert type constraint is not really a problem but just one of the things is if i click ok that thing's still able to spin around in that hole so that would be another constraint type we would have to do in order to lock it down a new feature in 2019 is the ability to lock the rotation for a insert type constraint a little bit of a problem there with that though is just make sure there's no other options down there whenever you do that it's going to rotate it to a certain point and it could have went correctly it could have went left or right it could went up or down and you really have no control over where it goes so for a situation like this is not really ideal situation like a bolt or a nut that lock degree of freedom on the insert type is a pretty nice little trick there that they've added into it so take a look for that check box once you get into the 2019 software and uh you can look at that so in our situation because clicking that check box turned it to the side i'm going to switch back over to a joint type rigid type i'm going to click those same selections i'm going to place that in there now you can see it's still on its side on here but i have some alignment options that i can do now so i'll click that face and then i'm going to rotate around until i can find the correct orientation so it looks like using that top face is going to work and then i'll just simply switch the alignment option there for me so using the ridgid this time i had to do an alignment click ok again that is fully locked down the ridge is going to lock all degrees of freedom there we have our completed assembly let me go ahead and save this one i'm going to close out of it and we're going to take a look at the next one that i want to show you guys this is a bolt lock like you would typically see you know on a sliding door or any kind of doorway or something like that take a look at that in a little bit but what i want to do is show you a couple more different types of joints and constraint options that are going to pop up and that you can use to control your designs so to start off with this part is my grounded part that's connected to my origin so that's what's going to be locked down so the first thing i want to do is i want to constrain this guy in place and get it located so i'm going to go ahead into my constrain tool and i'm going to select the axis of that rounded part and the axis of this rounded part and the reason why i want to do that because now i get to show you the different solutions whenever we're dealing with axes that we didn't have in previous versions of software new for 2019 feature so i definitely wanted to show you guys those today so we have different solution types that we can go with this first one or the second one to flip whenever we're dealing with an access to access i know i'm excited about that because that's been one that i don't know why it's never showed up in the software so i'm definitely excited that's not an option got the correct orientation i'm gonna go ahead and click okay i'm gonna slide that guy away let's go ahead and rotate this let's add another constraint on these bottom faces to make those flush to each other and then the spacing we're going to deal with a main constraint here as well just to fully lock and that should be 0.75 gap so those two are locked into place now and now we're going to start taking a look at these next couple parts i'm going to switch over to a joint tool and we're going to take a look at uh i'm just going to go ahead and grab couple edges here and again you want to make sure that you're grabbing the right the right edge the right orientation so a little bit of finesse there just making sure you get into the right area when i make those two selections it wanted to go with a rigid type i'm gonna switch that over to a cylindrical type and you're gonna see an animation of what exactly it can do so you can see that it's rotating and it's sliding back and forth in there that's exactly what i want uh looks like the orientation is pretty good but before i click ok i'm going to switch over to the limits tab section there i did i want that bleeding face that's better i'm sure my numbers are correct so animate that again still doing exactly what i wanted to it is showing my hole is to the side i want that to default upward so i'm going to go with an align option i'm going to pick that axis i'm going to come up and i'm going to find another alignment that i can make that happen looks like it's pointing straight down that's good enough because i can always flip it and now before i click ok i'm going to switch over to limits so i'm going to add some linear limits my starting is going to be negative 0.35 current is left at zero that's fine and my ending is at 0.35 make sure that my test numbers work out fine we'll find out in a moment i'm actually going to take a look at these ranges just to make sure that looks like it's where it's supposed to be so i'm going to set that back to zero as my resting position there i'm also going to add in an angular option starting at zero ending at 90 degrees and i can do a quick test here before i close out of the dialog box just to make sure that it is where i want it to go that looks perfect so i'm going to go ahead and click ok we'll test that in just a second i'm going to add another one and this is going to be bottom edge there and i'm going to find that inside edge it wants the default to a rotational based on the selections that i pick in this situation i don't care that it spins i'm going to switch over to ridgid and then click okay so let's take a look at this thing see what it can do now so with those types of constraints that i put in you can see you can slide back and forth i can activate the locking mechanism so if you take a look okay so i can go right through that material there so maybe i want to add something else here just to hold down or control the way that it moves some of you may know about this tool that i'm about to use if not this might be new for you i'm going to take these two parts that's my pin and my right hand portion of the lock itself i'm going to right click on those and i'm going to add them to a contact set then on the inspect tab i'm going to make sure that activate contact solver is turned on mine still is but it's usually defaulted to off so with the contact set turns on what's going to happen is i can still slide this back and forth but it's not going to allow me to pass it through metal because it's going to sense that interference there so now i get some control as far as using a joint and using a contact set as far as how that thing can move back and forth all right let's go ahead and save that one and then we're going to take a look at another one that i have to show you guys and this is a vice assembly and this one we're going to use a handful of different types maybe even show you a couple situations where i'll pick one over the other and the reasons why so in this one we have a few different things that i'm going to go with the joints hole here and i'm just going to switch it to rigid right off the bat and i want to show you how easier how much easier some of these constraints are going to happen so we got this plate here that's going to be mounted with those screws to the back of my vise here and typically that would take at least two maybe even three constraints uh maybe a couple inserts to align those holes maybe you can even do a mate between the back of the plate and the vise and a couple flushes on the top and the side so a few different situations there where you can actually constrain it dealing with the joints using a rigid type i'm going to hover over the back of this plate i'm going to find that point actually i'm going to go with the uh yeah this one i'll go with that point right in the middle i'll find that point right there i think that was a bad click i'm going to redo that that one doesn't have a center point i'm going to deal with so i'm going to go with the top center point and the top center point of that particular face that looks a lot better and that's going to lock it in and that's going to fully constrain that plate to the vise with one single joint next thing we're going to take a look at is using the rigid type as well for these screws so i'll hover over the screws get that correct edge that correct point same thing here apply that one get the next one and apply that one again fully constraining those screws and that plate down with one joint type each so the next one to take a look at here i'm going to take this plate and attach it to this plate so i'm going to go with the joint again and this one i've tested a few times and i found the situation that i like i'm going to go with the edge make sure i get the right edge here go with the edge of this one so a couple tweaks that i need to make you can see the preview is not where i expected to be let's go ahead and flip that connection and we'll also flip the alignment and then animate it looks like it's set to rigid so i want to switch that maybe to slider and you can see that it looks like it's sliding in the correct orientation holes are facing the correct way but we want to set up a limit for this and i'm going to go with a 0 for starting and it's 75 for the ending i'll click ok and we'll take a look at that guy and see that it's moving exactly where i need it to be again fully locked down except for that sliding ability there all right let's add a few more here so i'm going to grab the midpoint of there midpoint of there lock that down with a rigid sliding back and forth is still able there and then let's add a couple more i love using this ridgid especially for this hardware and makes the hardware so much easier you don't have to worry about dealing with the the rotational aspect of hardware if you're using an insert constraint one click you're done one type you're done then click ok again slide that back and forth in that limit seeing how that motion works i'm going to switch over to a constraint type i'm going to go with an insert here and the reason i'm going with an insert on this one is because there is an eventual degree of freedom that i want in this case and that's the ability for that handle to rotate so i'm going to leave it with an insert that way it is free to do that and then down here we've got a few more parts to put on here uh so i'm going to go with some joints and i'm going to use these planar types now so these planar types i'm going to find that midpoint of that face i'm going to attach it to this face you can see that animation happening there that's fine i'm going to go ahead and apply that because the next step i'm going to do is i'm going to grab that face to this space it's going to pop up with a message box asking you if you're sure you want to do that i'm going to go ahead and click yes and you can see that it's going to rotate into place there where i need it to be i'm going to click ok and i'm going to grab hold of it and move it around just to make sure that it's going to do exactly what i wanted to other side i'm going to do the same exact thing so let me run through a couple planers here real quick that center point grab that center point apply that one grab those two click yes to that box make sure that the orientation is correct looks like that one flipped so i'll click my flip button find the right flip orientation the alignment there to get it facing the correct way with that keyhole facing out toward me these two guys are going to slide together so i'm going to make that easy on myself by switching back over and doing a flush type constraint on their end faces click apply for that one thing i've noticed about joints uh joints do not have the ability let me switch down over here to planes at least in the situations that i've used it to pick up origin planes so i try to make a liar out of myself by by switching around here and finding one but uh from what i've seen i'm not able to pick up origin planes now you remember at the beginning i mentioned hey i like to use origin plans whenever possible and there's certain situations that that certainly demand it here's a situation that does these keys these key ways these square cut keyways are going to line up with these two holes in the bottom of my moving jaw so what i can do is i can use a constraint type i'll find the work plane that passes right through the center of one of those and line that up with the axis of the hole in the moving jaw apply that i'm going to switch over to a rigid type because i got a couple of round parts here that are going to fit in let's just zoom the rest of the way around make sure i grab the right surface i always tell people when i'm training and when i'm just talking about best practices and things like that don't be afraid to rotate don't be afraid to zoom in i know we're dealing with a webinar situation here so hopefully i'm not making anybody too seasick and hopefully the screen's keeping up with me as as well as can be expected so a couple joints there just to finish off that part of the design so in this situation now i have a working vise slides back and forth as i wanted to you're going to notice one thing that's not necessarily a pet peeve of mine but one thing that i wish that the joint tool was able to do so as i slide this back and forth and i let it go it's just going to let it stop wherever i happen that to drop that mouse off at i'm not a big fan of that not a big fan of that because if i have a drawing of this for example and i have some overall dimensions uh maybe in the fully open fully closed position i can very easily mess up those dimensions by sliding this thing around or mess up drawing views just things that i don't like to do so what i'm going to do with this one is i'm going to go find that plate i'm actually going to get rid of that slider joint that i put in there you go ahead and delete that guy out of there so when i do that this thing is free to move around quite a bit now so a couple things that i want to do is i'm going to add in a couple constraints some flush constraints apply that one and top and bottom top to top as well before i switch to a make constraint to control the distance between these faces and what i want to do with this is i'm going to click this double right hand arrow and i'm going to use the limits option in the constraint dialog box itself so i'm going to set up a maximum and a minimum the maximum is going to be 75 minimum is zero and one thing that i like to do with this when you're using limits because if i click ok for this and i slide it back and forth it's going to behave the same way where just let's go wherever i drop it off at i'm going to edit that i'm going to activate this checkbox to use offset as resting position and i'm going to put a value in here we'll put 30 in the use offset as resting position is a really important option there now what happens is i slide this back and forth just to test the movement see what happens make sure there's no other interferences and i let it go it's always going to snap back to that resting position that i defined okay so we took a look at a couple situations there uh where we can use some constraints we can use some joints in order to define how we want to assemble things and i hope i showed you guys some some usefulness from the joint tool at the very very least and the first one that i definitely want you guys to be using is that rigid option the joint tool rigid anytime you're dealing with hardware even you can see how quickly it was to put the plates attached the jaws to my vise that rigid tool is going to help you out quite a bit it's going to save you a quite a few different constraints there it also locks down the degree of freedom even though in 2019 the insert command has that checkbox it doesn't work it doesn't work great because it has the potential to rotate your component and maybe you don't want it to we saw that on my trailer hitch so we can use the rigid and then we have the alignment options best advice i can give you guys with that is to just spend some time working with it get used to what it's a what it's asking of you and uh remember it's not the same as a constraint so what you're expecting your strength towards you shouldn't expect in the joint tool it does work a little bit differently i've typically always been under the impression that joint tool is more useful if you do have things that need to be in motion but we saw some situations here where this jaw plate no motion there use the original one one relationship that thing is locked into place on the other hand moving back and forth this device i do want to move it back and forth and i was able to accomplish that pretty easily using the joint tool but it doesn't give me the added bonus that the limit in the constraint type has with the offset option as a resting position so definitely a little bit of back and forth there that uh you're going to want to take into consideration so the biggest takeaway and the biggest challenge i have for you guys is to if you've never tried this tour out or if you've stayed away from it for a while if you're like me and you never used it just because of lack of effort and because the constraints will always work for you didn't have a problem with it take a look at it especially that rigid option give it a shot if you have any questions along the way feel free to reach out to to myself or to our support team and we can help you work through maybe a situation where you want to try it out let me bring back up that powerpoint a couple of generic slides here at the end definitely want you guys actually before i do that before i do that i have one more pull for you guys and i want to launch that poll for you right now and that's basically asking you now you've seen these tools and actions what is your next step there uh hopefully see some of you guys trying out the joint tool yeah i got a few of you picking that option all right so about half you're going to give that joy tool a try another 20 percent of you or so are going to stick with constraints but i definitely want to try out that rigid joint option i know that's about what i expected to see try out that assemble tool as well i didn't really give you guys a good demo of that one but you saw where it's located at and like i said it works the same way as the constraint option but it bases your selections and then tries to help you out there and close that poll all right so as always keep an eye on upcoming mesa events including our webinars uh just a preview of common events couple weeks gonna see the return of the jared and josh show when we take a look at what's new in adventure and vault 2019 you saw two sneak peeks today so definitely tune back in to see what else is new in 2019 missed a previous webinar we do host those on our website so definitely take a look there and see we're hosting them we're actually going to be switching over to a youtube type hosting but you'll still be able to access them from our website and as always thank you guys very much for attending hope you guys learned some value out of this webinar as always and if you have any questions comments or feedback feel free to reach out to me questions support related issues you can reach out to our support line as well thank you guys you guys have a really good weekend and we'll see you next time

Channel: MESA, Inc.

Views: 5,044

Keywords: Autodesk® Inventor®, Inventor Joint vs Constraint, Inventor relationships, Inventor joints vs constraints, Inventor contraint, Differences between constraints and joints, Autodesk Inventor 2019, Autodesk Inventor 2019 Constraints, Autodesk Inventor 2019 Joints, Autodesk Inventor Constriants, Autodesk Inventor Joints, Joint vs constraint Inventor, Constraints vs joints

Id: zS6tKqkQWxU

Length: 38min 49sec (2329 seconds)

Published: Thu May 03 2018