Dynamic Mirroring?

[hrose07]

Is there any way to have dynamic mirroring in Inventor 2014?

For instance, if I have a plate constrained to the end of an I-Beam and then I mirror it about the center plane of the beam. Everything is fine until I decide to change the length of my I-Beam. Then the plate is simply stuck out in space somewhere.

I would like Inventor to determine the distance to the mirror plane has changed and update the mirrored component. Is this possible? Thanks for the help.

[jtylerbc]

After mirroring, use the Symmetry constraint (new in Inventor 2014) on the two plates, with the beam's center plane as the symmetry plane.

[hrose07]

I don't like the fact that the mirror utility doesn't do that automatically but at least I can physically do it now. Thank you!

[jtylerbc]

Me neither, but for now this seems to be the closest thing to it.

One workaround you can sometimes use (depending on your geometry) is to use a circular pattern with 180 degree spacing instead of Mirror.  Patterns do maintain their associativity, so this can get around the limitations of the Mirror Components command in some cases.

[hrose07]

I'm very new to Inventor so I'm not sure but, didn't 2013 work like that?

Yeah, I did notice that patterns do dynamically update but I never thought to try that.

[jtylerbc]

2013 was actually worse - the Mirror command worked exactly the same way, but there was no Symmetry constraint to fix it manually.  You had to work around it using two constraints with their offset parameters linked, so that changing one updated the other as well.

Obviously, the pattern solution is situational - if the geometry of your part isn't symmetric, then rotating it and mirroring it produces a different result.  Technically, pattern and mirror are producing different results even when the parts are symmetric.  However, if the part is symmetric, the rotation created by the pattern isn't visually distinguishable.