Using Frame Generator in Autodesk Inventor

[Music] hello and welcome back so in today's video we're getting into one of my favorite parts of inventor and that is the frame generator the frame generator takes a wireframe sketch whether that is a combination of 2d sketches or 3d sketches and can take that wireframe and populate it with any of these structural shapes from our content center and man i cannot tell you enough how much i love this tool it makes creating platforms uh standing uh standing equipment stands you name it there's so many applications for it and it's so easy to use so let's go ahead and dive on in so first thing like i said it works off of wireframe sketches so i am quickly just going to sketch up a simple box here better make it big enough to fit this let's do a 24 inch square here back up all right there we go all right so there i have this particular sketch now like i said you can use 3d sketch or what i prefer to do myself is kind of stitch a bunch of 2d sketches together and it's really easy to do just requires you to create some work planes and use your origin planes as well but i'm going to go ahead use my plane tool here and create another side to this and i want to use my x y there i'm going to use my edge there okay let's go in sketch on here and i am just going to project top and bottom there and we'll go out 24 inches again well maybe where'd he go there it is there we go and i'm going to shut off that work plane now it's a lot easier to see okay so i've got my little l shape here and i'm gonna go ahead and save it okay now i've got that saved i'm going to go in and i'm going to open up an assembly because it's only located in an assembly file go in and i'm going to place where'd it go frame generator test there and now that i've got that in there if you go over to the design tab you'll notice there is a big section here for a frame first thing that you start off with is insert frame and it's going to ask you to go ahead and save your assembly because it has to be saved first before you actually get into placing your components and i'll come in here just call it frame generator and once it's saved it brings up this insert menu for my frame now looking at your category you can go find angles channels i-beams you name it it is all in here you can go by standard as well which is awesome as well as your family your size these are all standard sizes you would see from vendors in industry as well as your material and you can change your appearance if you want to but those are all there to set up and pick the shape that you want and so looking at this let's go ahead and get us some ankle and we're gonna do equal angle here and let's make this something pretty typical so like two by two by quarter and we don't want mild steel let's go ahead and change that to stainless okay so i've got my frame member kind of set up now the next part involves how we want to orient the piece and us actually placing it on our wireframe so here you've got your orientation window which allows you to change the orientation of where your piece is sitting in reference to the geometry that you've picked and from there you have your offsets in the xy direction and the xz direction as well as your ability to rotate it now let's go ahead and we'll just start with this little upright piece right here now if i zoom in you can see there is our ankle piece and the way that it is set up with our orientation being in the dead center of the part you can see it's just kind of floating off in space there you can see our reference is where this dot is indicated now something they've added in 2020 which is a lifesaver is they give you these orientation dots here so if i click there it changes it over here in my menu as well before it was a guessing game of where it was going to be oriented at and it was irritating so this is a vast improvement over previous editions of the frame generator and we also have the option if we want we can actually mirror our frame here it also gives us the direction of the rotation which is so many quality of life stuff that they've added in here but for example if i want my piece to be in the corner here and i need to rotate this to kind of get it in the position that i want so if i want to rotate it i can go here type in 90 and if you look it's rotated my part 90 degrees now you can also just click and drag on your arrows here to offset them i'm old school i like to type in my inputs but if i rotate it around 180 degrees i get it in the position that i want now from here i just go ahead and hit ok reply add that piece in and move on to my next piece but the neat thing about frame generator is you can kind of keep those settings and just keep clicking on your frame members it will keep them oriented kind of how you set that first member up so i've got that i'm going to go ahead and hit apply now the first time that you go in and create a frame it's going to ask you for a new frame file name where that frame's location is going to be at your skeleton file name and where it's going to be located at and typically it will just go ahead and create a new folder for you that will have this stuff in it so typically i don't change this unless you know i have a specific spot that i want to locate this in my project file but for me i'm just leaving it as is for right now so when i hit ok it brings me into this next menu for my frame member naming so if i want to change the name of these different files one thing to note as you're creating your frames inventor is making a part for each individual piece now there are ways to reuse components but just keep this in mind that it does go in and it does create a part for each individual frame member that you add and again those are saved into those previous folders that we were just creating so i'm not going to change anything i'm going to leave it as is i'm going to hit ok and if we look here there we've got a nice little angle frame and i am going to go ahead and i'm going to place one more piece right here and again i want that corner to kind of line up with my reference line here so i'm going to take that down to zero degrees see where it gets me and it's still sticking out so i'm going to try 90 and there we go it's lined up where i want it to be so in this case i'm going to go ahead and click ok notice this time it didn't take us into that frame and skeleton saving menu it just went straight to the frame member naming and i'm just going to leave it as is for now and there i've started a frame now could you imagine modeling those or just even placing them from the content center constraining them all together like that that is time consuming and i did this frame in a couple minutes so this is why i love this tool so much now from here there are a few things that we can do to treat the ends of our frame members because if i zoom in and hover over my frame here you can see they're intersecting they're running through each other and that does not happen in real life so we need to treat the ends of our piece here that's where some of these other commands come in now that i've got a frame in there they are no longer grayed out i can use them one of my favorite tools is the miter tool makes it really easy to get a good end treatment on our different frame members so if i go in here and select my up right here and then select my piece there and hit ok zoom in again it's monitored them at 45 degrees again if you think about the time you have to go in there and manually do all this this tool is a lifesaver and now i've got a realistic connection between my two pieces there and i'm simply just going to go through and use my miter tool and do it draw my pieces around the outside here the only bad thing is you know as you notice i'm going in there one at a time to miter these pieces together still it's a lot quicker than the other alternative so rotating around i've got my outside pieces all mitered together and if we look at our upright piece here it is still intersecting these two pieces now i can't really miter those we could uh but the guys out in the shop might smack you for doing a three-way miter so let's try and avoid that what i like to do is go in and either use the lengthen to shorten if i have an exact value that i need to either add or cut away from a frame member i can do that trim extend allows me to trim a piece to a plane or a face of another part or trim the frame will trim up two pieces and have them meet in this particular application i don't want trim to frame because i've already got my other members connected how i want them to so i can either use lengthen and shorten or trim extend to cut those or cut this piece back to meet up with the other frame members i'm just going to go in use trim extend and select my piece here for my face i'm going to select the bottom of one of those angle pieces and it'll give you a preview of it being cut away again this is new in 2020 which thank you autodesk for the quality of life improvements to frame generator but if i hit apply you'll notice it cuts that away and if i come down to the bottom go in cut there but i have got my frame all set up and ready to go and from here it's just saving it getting it to a drawing and getting all those appropriate annotations onto the drawing so really cool super neat tool uh back when i was working in industry i use this non-stop making platforms ladders handrails you name it it's a great tool for all of those applications plus many many more but i hope you learned something today take this utilize it build onto it build with it and as always stay inventive [Music] you

Channel: Thalmet

Views: 176

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Autodesk, Inventor, Autodesk Inventor, Frame, Generator, Frame Generator, CAD, 3D CAD

Id: DM52GzbSgik

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021