Parametric design: Calculating the none parametrics, a better way?

[Anonymous]

Example: You have a triangel with two perpundicular lines, their lengths are given as user parameters, one of the angles is also a user parameter.

If I need the length of the side that isn't a user paramter I create a new user paramete in the following way:

 [New parameter] triangle_calculated_side = "triangle_hypotenuse / cos(triangle_angle)"

The problems with this is:

* I can make misstakes in the calculation without realizing it.

* When you get more complicated relations, even with a good comment, it can be hard figuring out how to change it to the correct calculation if you have to do changes.

Does anyone have a better way of doing this?

Note: When using the dimention tool, you can click a driven distance but you only get the numer (i.e. "20.60 mm") while if you click a user parameter or locked line, you'll get the name of the line (i.e. "d7").

[TheHangman]

Hey @Anonymous

I am not sure if I miss concept your point, but I am wondering what you are meaning by 2 perpendicular lines in 1 triangle. This what I understand…



Having said that, IMO parametric modelling is just the modelling base where your features is formed over given parameters "2D Geometry" (point of references, dimensions and other constraints) and whatever you will model in parametric basis it can be easily editable by changing its value, and even associating parameters from different features in order to compose a formulae.

For instance I have a sample here:  https://gallery.autodesk.com/fusion-360/projects/bmx-race-cog
Where it is applied a circumference formulae in a parameter so that whenever you update a feature value (Nº of Tooths) the overall ratio follow up conform to.

Again, a picture/3D model worth 1000 words, so if you have a sample of what you trying to explain mathematically would help.

Nevertheless, the hardest maths behind the 3D modelling comes when you modelling a Surface Basis (Alias, ICEM, CATIA and others) where any misplaced patch can cause a drastic problem later at some point and one of the surface rules is to never obtain a triangular patch.

Hope it helps. 

[HughesTooling · Accepted solution]

I think what the Op is talking about is you can't access the driven dimension as a parameter, see this example.

If you need the 103.077641 you'd have to do the math, d6 is not made available in the parameters manager.

Mark

[Anonymous]

I saw in another post (Thread "Parametric modeling ?") that we should be getting access to imported models parameters (in months, not years). So hopefully this might change at that point in time too.

[HughesTooling]

There are a few requests in the Ideastation you could help vote up.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/ability-to-reference-driven-dimension...

Mark