pipe creation command - follow path, but not construction axis?

[mbostonsprint]

I am hacking away on some light path design, and thought I could perhaps use the create/pipe tool to emulate a ray bundle, following a construction axis. My definition of "path" for pipe to follow would definitely include construction axes, but that is seemingly not the case. Can someone confirm this? I assume one neeeds a line or more from the behavior.

Along the same lines (so to speak), I put a suggestion in the idea station today regarding the use of construction axes and how it would be nice to be able to generate a work plane perpendicular to a construction axis, in the absence of anything else to easily work from. This looks like another opportunity to make a suggestion. The specific situation is that I have some imported .stp geometry and bodies, which I have linked by construction axes, and the axes are typically non-orthogonal to the origin planes. None of the bodies have orthogonal properties relative to the axis. Basically skew lines in space at the moment. Creating a cylinder along one of these axes seems quite cumbersome, but maybe I'm missing something.

Does anyone else think that construction axes seem surprisingly limited in their usage capabilities? Not looking for a rant episode, but I have run into this a lot in the work I'm trying to do.

[jeff_strater]

Hi @mbostonsprint,

Thank you for your post.  This is a great topic to discuss, thanks for bringing it up.

The answer to both of your questions is actually the same.  The issue is that construction axes are actually infinite lines.  Yes, they are drawn to a limited extent in the graphics, but that is only a graphics artifact, there are no actual points there.  For both of these usages, Fusion needs to be able to reliably position the pipe endpoints or the work plane at the same position along the path.  For things like Sketch Curves or Edges, we use the distance along the curve (expressed as a parametric value from 0 to 1).  With that input, we can make sure that the item updates predictably.

This is not, of course, to say that this can never be implemented, only that Fusion is not today set up for this.

Hope this is at least relatively clear.

Jeff

[mbostonsprint]

Jeff,

Thanks for the info. I see the distinction, and understand the reasoning as it stands. As I've mentioned in some other posts, though, I think "a boat is being missed" with respect to construction axis functionality. The largest advantage to having these axes be more workable would be reduction of effort in needing to go to Sketch mode to make real lines for path creation, or needing to go through many steps to create a foundation to then create something following an axis in space at some arbitrary angle.In all fairness, this is likely a problem mostly related to importation of externally-created components and bodies, for which there is no Fusion-based pre-existing geometry in place, and one needs to work around what is there already.

It does seem to me that there is some sort of algorithmic application that determines how long to make the axis in the case of a default selection, e.g., "Axis between Two Points", where the graphic display shows a percentage of additional length beyond each point. I suspect this is some predetermined ratio, and might be "easy" to add code to create a point at each terminus of visibility, or to allow the selection of the visible endpoint to create a construction point. I note that it IS possible to select the endpoint to extend the visible length. That said, I'm not a software architect, so I'm not holding the high ground here, but a couple of such tweaks to construction geometry creation would be huge in my opinion.