Other uses for Sketch Blocks

I often find myself using Inventor for my home projects which often spurs a tip I share with you. Recently I decided to make a wood coaster bike for my 1 1/2 year old boy and wanted to model it in Inventor before I started cutting lumber. I quickly realized skeleton modeling would be the best way to lay out my design and make it easy to adjust parameters such as lumber thickness and frame angle.

 

 
I had several parts I need to create (frame, forks, wheels, handlebars and a few supports) and I wanted to be able to adjust them easily in one place. To make it as simple as possible I wanted to use Sketch Blocks but wasn't sure they would come across when I derived in my skeleton part.

 

To my surprise I was able to derive in my skeleton part and only import the block I wanted to use. This kept my sketch very simple while still kept it associative back to the skeleton model.

I hope this will be useful for those of you using skeleton modeling and weren't aware of Sketch Blocks - they are great!

Comments

[Alex Fielder]

This is excellent; would you mind sharing the completed assembly for this - I'd like to maybe build one of these for when my son reaches the age where he could ride it.

Thanks in advance,

Alex.

[Scott Moyse]

Garin,

This was the first thing I tried when the sketch block feature was released. Its brilliant, but ridden with bugs, I will be posting a thread on the community forum in the next few days calling for a hotfix with a list of the problems and the amount of time its costing us to deal with the problems it creates.

However, consider this, a large project might have a whole host of standard profiles that you would want to use in all of your different models. In our case, timber molding profiles for our cabinetry. However, due to the nature of our clients, the profiles can changes several times during the course of a contract before they go to manufacturing. Hence, the read only, publish once nature of content center has no use for us.

I set up a part file that contained only blocks representing all of our timber profiles. Then each cabinet skeletal model/multi body file derives to this block part file and uses the profiles to create extrusions. The result is a central location to modify these blocks that will update all files linked to it.

But like i said Autodesk have some work to do to make this reliable, since we would like to start using nested blocks extensively to control standard cabinetry details and create typical detail drawings etc..

cheers

Scott

[Garin]

Alex - send me your email address at "inventor dot blog dot feedback at autodesk dot com" and I will send you what I have.

[Garin]

Scott - Thanks for your feedback. I Will keep my eyes open for your post on the community site.

[cheap truck hire]

Of course , i do agree with your statement that we must make a prototype of any auto machine as it gives us a vivid view about interior as well as exterior architecture.

[Scott Moyse]

Here is a link to my discussion topic guys:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Inventor/Hotfix-required-for-known-Block-Issues-can-t-wait-until-SP2/m-p/2774828

[Scott Moyse]

Have you got any comments Garin? Would you like a few datasets?

[Garin]

If you can provide a dataset that would be great. I talked to our dev team and they have some info from you during your beta testing and are looking into this. Shoot me an email at "inventor dot blog dot feedback at autodesk dot com" with any more info and I will get back to you.