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Below is a typical scenario of what I am facing. That joint at the mid left hand side will not solve and there is no way to get it to connect. I know from past experience building up this assembly that *eventually* it will come together but there has to be a less painful way then nudge/try/nudge/try etc. It is clear to me from the picture that this joint should be solvable. I know once I pass the time/tolerance threshold it will solve but how to make this process quicker?
And here is what Inventor helps me to achieve:
I was trying to set the joint distance from the end of the pipe to the bracket holding it to all the same distance so that the assembly should be square and this is what Inventor interprets it as. In a way it is neat how it can generate abstract art from almost anything you throw at it.
Right now based on my observations I think I need to do the following:
- Assembling more than 2 parts is WAY too much for Inventor to handle, break down the final assembly into much smaller sub-assembies and then further divide those up
- Create the corner brackets as a separate assembly
- Create the bottom and top triangle assemblies from the corner assemblies
- Create the vertical joint assemblies
- Assemble assemblies 1,2 and 3 from above
Although for this particular assembly I doubt that Inventor would be able to solve it once the final joints are attempted and will result in a picture similar to above.
you should never need to nudge-try-nudge-try etc...
I'm assuming you've had no training, so have you gone through all the tutorials and understand what all the constraints do?
how are you trying to arrange these parts in the assembly? what constraints are you using? You've used the word rotational a few times... are you using the rotational constraint thinking that will tie these together? dumb question, i know, but thought I should ask...
zip the iam along with all ipts and post here (we need the ipt part files alongside the iam assembly file).
When creating an assembly build it how you would in life.
1) Place one part and have it grounded as a reference starting point.
2) bring in the next part and constrain it to the part(s) in the scene
3) goto 2
To align 2 tubes you can either:
1) use mate and select both pipe's central axis (making them axially aligned), but there it nothing stopping them sliding along that axis, so you will also need to mate/offset the pipes to lock it in a position along that axis. e.g. a nut on a thread - mating their axis will lock the nut onto the shaft, but it's not defined where on the thread it should sit, so it can slide up and down it, so add a mate/offset constraint to position it along the thread to where you need.
2) If you have 2 tubes butting up to each other, or a tube bottoming in a connector, then you can use the insert constraint which both axially aligns the parts and also provides that "position along the axis" constraint too.
Hope that kinda makes sense...
Sam M.
Inventor and Showcase monkey
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Hi!
Read about skeleton modeling and frame generator. Will Help you.
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CCarreiras
tonofsteel wrote:
Joint vs constraint. From what I read and understand the Joint is the "new" way of doing things and you should be able to achieve the same result using either method. I have build my assembly using mostly rotational joints between the pipes and fittings. I did use some constraints such as tangent to keep the pipe against the corner plates. I did not find any best practices sort of information on use of either one so is it alright to use whatever method seems to be most logical to me at the time of creating a joint/constraint? It seems that for some tasks there are ways of doing the same thing but using one or the other.
The other part I took away from the training was that a joint defines the one degree of freedom that is left un-constrained where the constraint method defines one degree of freedom that is constrained.
Not exactly true about being the new end all be all for assembly. Joints are a new supplemental way to put things together but some of the most robust assemblies will use Joints as well as Constraints due to the fact that Joints do not have all that Constraints offer in the manner of assembly.
What I have really liked about Joints is the ability to Lock degrees of freedom rather than grounding a component which can lead to invalid constraint issues. Locking a DOF will prevent movement of that DOF but not ground it in space as grounding would.
And different contraints and different joints remove different amounts of DOFs.
In order to Lock a Joint, right click on it and choose this option to remove the DOF if you need to. I do all this from the graphics screen now and rarely go to my browser to do it.
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