Inventor and the Yellow Lines

[Bill Tillman]

It's painstakinly slow, like watching paint dry, but I'm making progress. Will be completed with the first part tomorrow. Sad to say that if I knew last night what I know today the part would have been finished hours ago.

 

The extrusions have many facets on them. And I'm working with AutoCAD right on the next monitor. It's what let me quickly build the 3D part and look at it as well as compare dimenions and match up parts to see how it will all fit. I know it's that hard way but it's my way of learning this software as well as this custom system.

 

I would like to ask what are the yellow lines which show up on the surfaces after I complete sketches? See screenshot below.

[the ber]

They're called work planes. You use them for example for creating holes on curved surfaces. There are tons of tutorials on these. Try JD Mather's.

[Bill Tillman]

Thanks. Sorry for being such a dweeb on this. I found from another search what those yellow lines are and why they were still visible after I exit the sketches. I have read JD's startup options tutorial, I guess like most people I just wasn't paying attention in class....(again). I will have time to reinforce this today because I just finished the first part. It's 2920 mm long and has a total of 19 holes in it. Looks like swiss cheese in some regions. This morning the progress of placing the holes was much easier. Now it's on to the parts which get notches and holes. That should be fun but it will have to wait until the 2nd shift begins again tonight.

[the ber]

I had a chance to "play" with Inventor a couple of years ago. There's a lot to learn. (For "notches" I think you want to extrude, using negative distance.)

[JD Mather]

They're called work planes.

 

 

No, that looks like sketch lines to me. Specifically auto-projected sketch lines which I never use. (turned off in Application Options)

The sketch visibility can also be turned off.

 

And what is that Alias Edit feature doing in the feature tree. You are a longggggggggggggggggggggggg way from being ready for Alias Edits in Fusion (actually, I don't think the Alias Edit tool is ready for prime time itself).

 

You could probably right click on that feature and a bunch of those unused sketches and Delete them from the history tree.

[Bill Tillman]

JD, I don't know how that happened. I do remember that last night something I did caused Inventor Fusion to open up. It showed me the part but I just closed it back down and then went on to work. And there were two occasions while I was working with AutoCAD zooming in and out with the mouse in 3D iso mode that AutoCAD just whacked, gave me the infamous error message and closed down. It lost all the work the first time but the second time it did allow me to recover. By then I was constantly saving my work with Ctrl+S. Inventor stayed solid all night. My machine is an i7 quad core with 12 GB of RAM with Windows 7 x64. But AutoCAD 2012 x64 does lock up on me and it always seems to be when I'm scrolling the mouse while doing 3D work.

 

Which brings me to my next question of housecleaning. Some of those 23 something sketches are mistakes or one that I started and then got backwards on and just started over. What's a good rule of thumb for cleaning them up and does Inventor having something like AutoCAD's purge which will get rid of empty sketches. I assume lot's of extraneous sketches like this will not only increase file size and slow things down but may wreck havoc when the CNC guys get ahold of this for fabrication.

[JD Mather]

Shouldn't have any effect with CNC, but I do like to clean up.

The only problem is if you created dependecies with other stuff you do need, otherwise simply right click on the sketch and select Delete. Should be able to do the same with the Alias feature. Just watch that it doesn't thow any errors. If it does - simply undo and ingnore the extra garbage.

[Bill Tillman]

Thanks again. I will most likely trash the whole thing tonight and start over. For one it will allow me to do the process again and reinforce what I've learned. Second, I will be doing a desktop sharing with an associate to train him on how I did this with Inventor and 3rd I need to measure my improvement. To get the part this far has taken me about 12 total hours. I am reasonable sure I can do it again tonight in less the 30 minutes and not end up with all the garbage.

[JD Mather]

... I am reasonable sure I can do it again tonight in less the 30 minutes and not end up with all the garbage.

 

I tell my students all the time to - just start over, but they say, "I have too much time invested in this already - I don't have time to start over." Then the night before assignment due they finally give up and start over finishing the entire project with better quality in far less time than they spent fighting the poor quality work trying to make it right.

 

Everyone in this field looks at what they did last year, month, week, yesterday? .... and shudder at the garbage they produced.

We learn from our efforts and (hopefully) get better and faster.