In the drawing
have you ever needed to show components buried down below?
I didn’t have a
lot of time this week for blogging but I forced myself to wake up early today
and write a couple of words on this trick I use quite a lot. Will try and keep
it simple for now and will do a follow-up next week on layers and how to
leverage them to your advantage.
A
lot of the times I find myself in need to indicate components that are not
visible unless you change the view to hidden lines. That can be daunting for
untrained eye to look at and it will clutter the drawing so I tend to avoid it
if I can.
For example take
a look at the vessel in the image bellow. Turning the view to hidden lines
would have made a mess out of it with no way to identify what’s what. Showing
just the legs in hidden lines makes a huge difference.
Hidden lines accentuate design.
To show a
component you need to find it in the browser, right click, and choose "Hidden
Lines".
Enabling hidden lines
As soon as you
set hidden lines on you get a message saying "Dependent vies styles will
become independent”.
Changing the view message
Sometimes the “Hidden
Lines” menu will be grayed out and that is because your view has linked design
view representation. For that you need to edit your view and tick the “Associative”
box off as bellow.
Associative off on view properties
A new option is
needed here besides “show hidden lines” and that should be simply “show” which
will turn the model visible (in dotted lines because it is underneath in the
background) without its internal geometry. I need to indicate the component in outline,
not the whole geometry but that’s for a latter post.
Next new feature?
Take a look at
the drawing below. The drain header is visible and I only need
the outline body; normally we show all runs in hidden lines but this is just a
sales proposal and I couldn't be bothered. This shows just enough info,
eliminating clutter and accentuating design.
The title might
confuse you and lead you to believe that I will talk about iAssemblies. That’s
a nice topic on its own but I will cover a different idea.
You will use this
in the prototyping phase to quickly test alternate solutions for routing your
pipes. And when you do, think of me and all the sleepless nights I’ve wasted
testing and pushing the limits of Inventor and T&P trying to help you out.
For months I have
been testing and preparing a blog on mirror, clone, derive, and copy and ...
there’s not much to be told. Autodesk has locked it all in and it’s for the
most of it unavailable so no blog for me. I am still testing though and present
the mirror command briefly in here now.
One of the posts
on the idea station on overhauling T&P (idea 56 actually) is about getting route
lines to construction and vice-versa and in the process have Inventor to
automatically add and remove pipes depending on the line type.
That is a nice idea and you should vote for
it, but meanwhile........ I have found a
way around it!
Don’t go tell Autodesk because they might fix
it, taking this option out and leave us to dry out again.
I have just
finished a quote for a client and it’s been accepted and signed off when we got
the CALL. It needs to be on the other side of the room and need it presto !
If you try to use
mirror on T&P or any of its runs you will get this message:
Maybe one of you
has a solution but I have tested as much as I could and no solution emerged. You
can mirror it alright but you can’t modify it later on, by means of making it a
T&P run and routes. If you disable T&P add-in you can use the mirror
and what I’ve done was to reuse all except routes and pipe segments. This works
so you can document it on a drawing but there is no “Make Adaptive” menu in
T&P anymore so it can’t be edited as we would a copied route.
You can however
mirror the sketch segments inside the route. This is not available on the Route
tab but on the 3D Sketch tab. This works ok and it’s better than you think. The
new segments will have mirror constrains and adapt to changes to the original
ones.
So I had a partial
solution to quickly mirror my routes but what about the fittings? Unfortunately
I had to place the fittings all again but took seconds because I would pick
them from the original route.
The problem is
that if you delete the original route segments you lose all constraints and
dimensions for the mirrored ones as well.
So I decided to
see if I can change the original segments to construction line and make
Inventor remove all the associated pipes and fittings. Using the Construction
button from the Format panel of 3D Sketch tab didn’t work at all but that’s
where we become creative and started“bending the rules”.
Let’s call the
assembly with the T&P files “main assembly” just to clear things out.
Create a new assembly and place the main assembly.
TIP: fastest way is to use copy paste. You right click the main
assembly (top node) and choose copy and in the new assembly use CTRL+V or paste
from right-click contextual menu.
Find the route in
the browser and edit it. Inventor will complain and tell you that: “To perform
Tube and Pipe operations, the main Tube and Pipe assembly should be open in its
own document”. Select the segments you need to change and use the Construction
button from the format panel of the 3D Sketch tab. As soon as you exit the
route Inventor will remove the pipe and fittings that were converted to
construction and will add elements where construction has been converted to
normal.
This opens a whole
new way of doing my prototypes and to test and verify alternate routing
solutions in the conceptual phase. It’s there where I tend to waste a lot of
time trying to spaghetti fit my pipes and the only option till now was to
delete segments and route them differently while now I can keep all options and
better test which will work better.
On a side node you
can now change all the edges added to the route with Include Geometry tool and
that were construction lines. So you can use edges from other equipment without
routing and constraining on top of them but rather use the included edge
itself.
At this point you
can close the new test assembly without saving it. It has never been saved on
disk just helped us change the route segments.
Last week I’ve
shown you how to do mixed styles routes and how to align the 3D ortho tool and
now it’s time to discuss construction lines for Tube and Pipe module of
Autodesk Inventor. At this point I wonder how many of you are using them and
even know of their existence?
The place command
is hidden, you cannot change them to normal and vice-versa, they are always
visible in the model and drawing and yet there are times when you might need
them.
Can’t say I blame
you if you’re not using them, you can do away with just dimensions and
constraints but I found them useful at times and that’s why I decided to share this post.
They could be
annoying being visible all the time but you can hide the route if need to and
on the positive side you can edit the route really quick by double clicking on
the visible lines.
The command is not
on the ribbon and it can only be invoked by right clicking on a node inside the
route. This is only available for route nodes, not on construction line nodes,
and it’s only available in the contextual menu while you are in the main Tube
and Pipe environment. If you open the run on itself and try to edit the route you
won’t have the option to do construction lines.
On each node you
can start multiple construction lines but keep in mind that you need to constrain them
even though you used the triad axis when drawing them. Regular segments get constrained
at least collinear or perpendicular with previous segments, while
construction lines are floating in model space with just one end connected to
the starting node.
In the image
bellow I am constraining the tee center in between the pumps by first creating
a construction line from one pump center to the second. Then I am doing a
different line starting from the tee node perpendicular to the first one and
coincident with the middle of first one.
A more eloquent
example might be when you need to dimension you route at an angle for which you
can’t use included geometry. At this point you can’t add dimension between
segments and planes, just to nodes and to get it right you might need to play
with formulas and trigonometry.
Using construction
lines you can constrain the projection of the angled segment into a plane that suits
you where dimensions can be applied.
As you can see in
the image bellow I have created a couple of construction lines to serve as
projection of the angled segment. There is a third one that is constrained
against the run origin (included geometry) and is used as fixed reference to
dimension against.
In the last
example that I have used construction lines to form a grid to
which I have constrained my nodes. This will work similar to reused dimensions
but it’s less messy, and the route is a little neater.
Start a construction
line and constrain it to your references, I would recommend that you use include
geometry on run origin planes. Keep your external references to a minimum, try
to avoid faces that could change leaving you with broken links. Keep these as
local as you can just like my run planes.
Constrain this
construction line coincident to one of the points, it doesn’t need to be the farthest
away, and you could even just use a small dimension to minimize its visual
impact outside of the route. Coincide the rest of the points that lay on this
line even if it doesn’t passes through them. The points will be in line with
the construction segment.
At this point you
just need to dimension one of the nodes and the rest of them in-line will
follow.
The good part is
that Inventor doesn’t generate a pipe segment where you’ve used construction
lines but you can’t switch them back and forward as you might expect. Once you’ve
done it as construction you need to remove it and draw it again as regular
if you need a pipe segment there.
The drawing
environment is having the same visibility problem with this type of lines. As
soon as you use include route centers it will bring over the construction lines
as well. You then need to turn visibility off by selecting them individually or
with window select.
And that’s how you
can use construction lines to help you speed up your design.
