Fill Pattern

[ewoudvanduijn]

So I have been a long time SolidWorks user, and there was one tool that was quite genious and a huge time saver. It's called 'Fill Pattern' and it fills an area with, well, a pattern. It looks a little bit like this:

You select an area to be filled, than define your seed geometry (there are some base forms but you can prepare your own feature like for example a slot). Than you set an offset from the borders of the area and BOOM you're finished.

With just a single operation you have a nicely filled piece of sheet. It is also way faster than the the linear and circular pattern operations, since on heavy patterns it only generates the instances it actually needs.

You can even create a split plane in the back of your plate to constrain the fill area even further.

There are a lot off things that Inventor really does better in my opinion, but this is a tool that I kind of miss.

If the Inventor team can implement something like this, i'd be a happy engineer :).

[Ivan_Sinicyn]

One of my most anticipated features.

[ewoudvanduijn]

@Ivan_Sinicyn right? Inventor feature suggestion of the year 😁.

@nam_ha check this out 😀

[knguyen_]

This is indeed suggestion of the year :D, I work with sheet metal everyday, this would be a huge time saver

[m.verripsTUJWY]

I've also been using SolidWorks for a while and this sure is one of the most convenient features SolidWorks has. Would be great if Inventor would have a similar functionality in the future! 

[ewoudvanduijn]

Thanks guys! Nice to see an idea like this resonating on the station 😁, The development team might already have spotted us since the post has been the third most voted new idea posted in the last 4 months together with Simplify in the cloud by @lune.riezebosand Hole to slot by @gtweed. Lets go vote for them and ask your collogues to vote and get these ideas a consideration status!

[lune.riezebos]

Voted, Thanks for calling out my idea as well

[ewoudvanduijn]

Anytime! 😉

[miechh]

Nice feature to have implemented!

[ewoudvanduijn]

Apparently in Fusion360, the tech is created already (maybe even in a better way than SW does it):

Fusion 360 Help | Create a geometric pattern | Autodesk

Thanks @MattH_Work for spotting this!