topic Re: Creating a hand drawn centerline in Inventor Forum

Creating a hand drawn centerline

piotrekdoro94 — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 07:41:55 GMT

Hi, I'm preparing some drawings that will be included in a product catalogue, so I'm trying to be mindful of the aesthetics. I've encountered a problem with centerlines.

On an example below, I've created a hand drawn centerline that consists of one arc (red) and two lines (violet and green). To the right I've roughly recreated the shape of a centerline with a spline. As you can see the spline centerline has consistent line segments and looks more visually pleasing. The arc + two lines centerline has choppy, uneven centerline segments.

I have a bunch of these so, I'm fishing for the best, low-effort solution and right now I'm leaning towards the spline method

Other things I've tried or considered:

create a 2d/3d sketch in a part and import it into a drawing view. This results to the same arc+ two lines centerline
convert to dwg and merge arc + two lines into a polyline. It's too much work.

This has always bothered me a little bit, but not enough to try to fix it. I wish Autodesk added a polyline feature to the sketch environment.

Re: Creating a hand drawn centerline

yaniX2UEG — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 08:03:14 GMT

Would this be an acceptable way of doing it?

(view in My Videos)

Re: Creating a hand drawn centerline

kacper.suchomski — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 08:03:56 GMT

Create a sketch in the drawing view and draw the center lines.

Re: Creating a hand drawn centerline

piotrekdoro94 — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 09:07:01 GMT

Thank you for reply, but this workflow results in the centerline shown on the left sign of the image

Re: Creating a hand drawn centerline

piotrekdoro94 — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 09:13:43 GMT

Thank you, but this will result in an uneven line segments shown on the left side of the image.

I've realised that I will have to convert my drawings to svg format for the final product, which means I will have to go through autocad anyway (idw-->dwg-->dxf-->svg), so I think I will stick to merging my segmented centerline into a polyline inside autocad.