Wednesday 2 March 2016

Taming the sketch point selections when adding a hole.


In the above picture I have used only 1 sketch for the locations of the slots and the hole. I created the Cut feature for the slot first and then shared the sketch so that I could add a Hole feature.

I hit a snag when I started the Hole feature in that both of the Sketch points were chosen and I couldn't un-select the point in the middle of the slot. I tried Shift and click and Ctrl and click, nothing worked.

The solution was to exit the Hole feature, select the 1 Sketch point first and then start the Hole feature again. This limited the Centres to only the 1 I had chosen and I was able to complete the Hole feature.

Below is a quick video of the process, and me stuffing the Hole direction up which I promptly fixed. No comments needed on that, we are all human (just some more human than others).



Tuesday 23 February 2016

Redefining middle plane of Content Centre parts.


While writing this post I realised that it's practically 1 year to the day since my last post! Seems like only last month. Time sure flies.

Anyway, onto the topic of this post. The title is really referring to Structural Steel members placed from the Content Centre (CC). Each family, even those supplied by Autodesk, appears to be an extrusion from the Start Plane out 1 direction, therefore making a midpoint Flush/Flush constraint difficult because you need to do some calculations (1/2 the member length) to get it constrained mid-plane into your assembly. For reasons I won't go deeply into now, I place all CC members as Custom. I do this is mainly because the file becomes somewhat editable and I can change the extrusion to get the mid-plane where I want it, in the middle.