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Sunday, June 09, 2013

A What's New in Autodesk Inventor 2014 - Creating Self Intersecting Sweeps.

“The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity”
Georg Brandes

I have some friends visiting in from out of town this week, so because of well spent time with them, this blog post is short, and without video.  I hope that it is still a helpful tip, even though it is quite brief.

In the last few weeks, I've been looking through the what's new topics, and seeing what I like. 

One of the tools that for my part, I think is going to be really helpful is the self intersecting sweep.

A self intersecting sweep is a swept feature where the profile intersects itself.  In earlier versions of Inventor, this sweep would be able to solve.  It would error out and fail.

An example of a sweep that would intersect and fail.

This meant readjusting the profile to make sure it didn't intersect.  And while, at least for my part, this hasn't been time consuming to do in the past, there's no beating not having to adjust the sketch at all.

This is where the new Feature in Autodesk Inventor 2014 helps out.  As a matter of fact, it helps out a lot.  It will allow this self intersecting sketch to calculate, and create itself without erroring out. 

A closeup of a radius that would have caused a failure in previous releases of Inventor.
But now, if I accept and hit "OK", Inventor calculates, and creates this sweep without a problem.  How about that!

Ta Daaaa!

I know that for certain profiles I would use, like router profiles in my woodshop projects, this is going to be a nice feature.  I can make sure that the profile matches the same profile my router bits will give me, without worrying about features that can't be swept because of that.

A view of the entire sweep profile

So think about this feature as you move forward into Inventor 2014.  Think of where it can be used for the type of sweep that router profile, where the result is legitimate, but it might not be easy to create because of the profile intersecting.



Think about it because, in fact, it just got a lot easier!


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