Feature Proximity Checking

[AlexFielder]

Hi all,

I am currently undertaking some project work for a customer and wondered if anyone has an example of checking for part Feature proximity to other features - a bit like how the interefence analysis tool works in the Assembly environment.

A little more detail to aid anyone who is interested:

I am working with 3mm thick x 4m long x ~ 700 mm wide Aluminium sheet which will be laser cut and then folded.

The features whose proximity I care about would be located on each of the flat faces after folding.

A general rule of thumb to avoid embrittlement issues with the Aluminium is no holes closer than 5mm apart.

Thanks,

Alex.

[xiaodong_liang]

Hi Alex,

I am afraid this is a sophisticated topic. It belongs to algorithm of clash detective.

Inventor API only provides the similar way of Assembly Interference like UI, while as you know, it is for assembly within components. And it only checks clash or not, instead of a proximity.

What I can think of is to get facets of part features, check the distance of each facet with those of other features, and know which is closest. Of course, using RangeBox of the ref feature to filter out most features which locate far away.

In a model with various shape of features, such algorithm will be bad. However the shapes are mostly planes, I think it might work, Sorry I am far from being an expert of clash detective. This is just what on top my head.

[AlexFielder]

Hi Xiaodong,

Thank you for getting back to me.

I shall look into your suggestion when I get time to do so.

🙂

[Anonymous]

I have never used it myself, but Inventor comes packaged with an add-in called "AutoLimits" from what I have read about it, it sounds similar to what you're looking for. You will find it in your add-in manager.

[xiaodong_liang]

I am afraid Auto Limits would not be what Alex needs because as I understand, Alex wanted to know if two features is much close than the limitation automatically. But in default, it is not known which faces of the two features are the closest. While Auto Limits is simply asking end user to select two faces and measure the distance. Of course, if the end user can judge which two faces are closest, he can pick them. Nevertheless, I do not see an API for Auto Limits, either.

[AlexFielder]

In my particular use-case for this, I would like to be able to select a face on a sheet metal Inventor part file, and have any features on that face be queried for minimum distance to other features on that face. (Normal parts could also make use of this too I suppose, but a per-face solution might be easier at this stage!)

A brief Twitter exchange with @Anonymous via Twitter yielded his (AutoCAD-centric) suggestion to "...collect a set of bounding boxes, then sort and compare them for overlap...".

If someone can point me to an example showing an implementation of getting the bounding box for a part or part feature that would be a great starting point!

Thanks,

Alex.

[xiaodong_liang]

Hi Alex,

surely you can get boundingbox of the feature by XXXFeature.RangeBox.  It is a Box object, But Box object is a mathematical utility object that represents a rectangular box whose faces are always parallel to the model XYZ planes. Although it could roughly filter out some features that are far away from the base feature (that is what I mentioned in message 2). It cannot be precisely check the  Proximity of two features. However I am not in the position who knows well about your requirement. If RangeBox can help, that will save much codes.