Pages

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Hiding the Skeleton Part in Your Inventor Frame Generator

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
George Bernard Shaw


Many a blog post has been inspired by a simple question.  This post is definitely one that came out of the "How can I get rid of the skeleton model used for Inventor's Frame Generator." 

Since the skeleton is part, by default, Inventor counts it as a component when we use it to make a frame with Frame Generator.  Every frame created using Frame Generator has one.

This leaves us with an extra part, one that Inventor uses for it's purposes, but will never exist in the real world.

Wouldn't it be great if we could make that component a "ghost" component?  Maybe like a "phantom"?

I'm playing on words, Inventor does have phantom components, and just like their name implies, they're intended to help us build our assemblies, but may not be part of the "real world" design.

In short, you can edit the Bill of Materials from the Assembly tab in your Inventor assembly, and change the BOM structure there.

First, edit the Bill of Materials
Then you can change the structure

 Naturally, there has to be a video to go with it.  So here it is!  Enjoy!


And by the way! If your new to Frame Generator, Rob Cohee has some nice videos HERE on how to use Frame generator!

3 comments:

  1. The main issue is that if you skeleton is a solid, your "mass" will be bad...
    The right way is to use "reference" instead of "phantom".
    Main issue : in the drawings you will see the solid in dash line. Just create a "special view without it" to remove it from the drawing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Piou2fois. Excellent point. I didn't double check the mass. I assumed (which we all know what happens when we do that!).

    Reference will remove the mass, and there are ways to remove it from the view as well.

    I'll write up a new post, probably next week.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nice Post About Generator parts.Thanks for the post, I will look forward to see more posts from your blog.

    ReplyDelete