Nesting Frame members

ayanF4AT5 — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 05:50:54 GMT

Hallo everyone,

I couldn't find a forum designated to Inventor Nesting.

I am trying to use Inventor Nesting as a solution that will enable me to fit 1000’s of frame members on say 12m lengths efficiently without consuming lots of time.

I have tried to follow the instructions on this https://youtu.be/KNJ-pgrO6lI video using a simple trailer model that is composed of c-channels, square tubes, round tubes and angles lines but its not working out as expected. I created a new nesting template inclusive of material and corresponding package for each member. Please help

I have attached any relevant file.

Thank you.

Re: Nesting Frame members

theo.bot — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 06:57:47 GMT

@ayanF4AT5

I liked your idea, but I think this is a more difficult then you would hope it is.

Starting with the limitation of the nesting functionality, it doesn't support saw cutting nesting. So like in the video explained you can tweak the system a little bit.

But it requires a lot of steps to make it work with content center / frame generator parts, so I don't believe its really helping your business goal here.

There are a few challenges that I encountered :

in order to work with ipt from an assembly, the BOM quantity setting needs te be "each". By default structural shapes are configured by parameter.
- even if you change the template definition in content center family, Frame generator sets all parts to back to a parameter reference when creating parts. So you needs to update this setting after creation.
Also the shape for the nesting is a difficult one, because for profiles uses the base extrusion. So all structural shapes result in a side view, not the length of your profile. To fix this you need to create unconsumed sketch that represent your shape.
- If you add this sketch in your content family template and used this with the nest authoring it will work, as long as there are no end treadments like mitter, cut/trim or notched are used. Because these features are created after the unconsumed sketch, the nesting shape extraction uses the first extrusion again. This can be solved by a small ilogic rule in the template making sure the sketch is always the last in the model tree.
The next challenge is the shape of the profile after mitter and notch features, I would think you can use the nesting for straight cuts. but if you want to optimize angle cuts, it requires a correct profile shape and if you would use a sketch you need to modify the profile as well.

So there are options to make it work, but it require a lot of manipulation of your content families. Meaning that is could work for new designs. If you now have an existing project it would make no sense to recreate all profiles. Of course you could manually open each file and make the right setting for nesting, but with 1000 parts I don't think this is efficient ;-).

Success with your project!

Re: Nesting Frame members

ayanF4AT5 — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 07:18:40 GMT

I did notice that it keeps picking the section front view each time and I intended to create an unconsumed sketch instead. Thank you for saving me so much time and explaining the concepts so well Theo!

I hope the Autodesk team takes this up with their developers.

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Nesting Frame members

Re: Nesting Frame members

Re: Nesting Frame members