I'm after creating a sketch on a part and projecting through just the outer edges of the component onto it. or taking a sketch and working out what the outer profile is ... there are lots of loops in the sketch and I tried to use these however couldnt find anything to distingush whether these were outer sketch elements.
I'm still looking at it myself but wondered in the interests of saving time if anyone had anything.
Thanks
Hi Chris,
I think you could create a profile from the sketch and then that would know what is outer and what is inner.
Cheers,
Thanks for the reply ...
In this case the outer profile changes as other features are turned on and off. Ie, I have a panel and I cut a groove through half the thickness from top to bottom. I have code that will change the lines generated by the cut feature to a different layer ... however that also includes the end lines that are actually part of the outer profile.
I've attached a simple example part to this (note the actual example is mroe complex). The groove lines need to be on a seperate layer on the drawing which I can do (code gets all the lines generated by that feature and changes the layer) I need to then change the outer edges back to the outer layer. If I do this via a sheet metal export to dxf, Inventor is able to output the outer and inner profiles on seperate layers so I'm wondering if there is some form of boundary command that we can use on a view to select the outer edges. At the moment I'm exporting to Autocad, generating a box round the shape and running the boundary command through the code. This then gives me the outer edges as a polyline that I can change layer on. I'd prefer to do this in inventor if I could.
hope that makes sence
Hi Chris,
You mentioned getting outer profile in sketch, so I wrote about that:
http://adndevblog.typepad.com/manufacturing/2015/01/get-outer-profile-loop-in-sketch.html
I don't know your other part documents, but maybe it would be enough to look for the outer loop of the biggest face of the model?
So you could get the other loop without doing a projection?
Cheers,