From the course: Inventor 2016 Essential Training

Drawing lines - Inventor Tutorial

From the course: Inventor 2016 Essential Training

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Drawing lines

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- We're now ready to begin looking at how to create sketch geometry, and we're gonna start with drawing lines. Drawing lines is really the most basic type of sketch geometry, and it's really one of the most commonly used items. In order to begin sketching, we need a sketch to start from. To do that, we're gonna click "Start 2D Sketch" from the 3D Model tab in the Sketch panel, and we'll select any of the planes, I'm gonna select the XY plane, to initiate our sketch. You'll notice now, we're in the sketch environment, indicated by the Sketch tab, and I've panned the window down to the left, just so we have a little more room to work. Now to start a line, we can either right click in the Graphics window, and select "Create Line," or we can go to the Sketch tab under the "Create" panel and click "Line" there as well. I'm gonna generally use the right click method, because it reduces the amount of mouse travel, and the commands are readily available there. Now, the act of creating a line is incredibly simple. We can start by left clicking somewhere in the graphics window to initiate the line, that places our starting point, and the left clicking anywhere else in the graphics window will produce the end point, or the second point of the line. And it will connect the line between those two points. Now you'll notice, if you move your cursor without getting out of the command, you're ready to create another line starting from the end point of the previous line. And you can continue left clicking around the screen, and you can create a series of lines. You can right click and select "Ok" or "Cancel," and you're done creating your line. Now, because creating a line is so simple, simply clicking twice in the graphics window will create a line, let's take a minute to undo this, and talk a little bit more about the heads hp display that is presented, because, even though we're creating lines, this same head's up display information is used when creating all sketch geometry. So let's take the time to learn a little bit more about that as we move along. I'm gonna use "Control Z" on the keyboard to undo the lines that I just created, and I'm gonna get back into the Line command by right clicking, and selecting "Create Line." Now let's look at the head's up display a little bit. Now that we're in the Line Command, you can tell we are indicated by the Line Icon being highlighted in the Ribbon Bar, but, as we move our cursor, something important happens. The X and Y position of the cursor is updated based on where our cursor's at. As we move our mouse, or cursor closer to the center point, you'll notice that the value of X and Y becomes closer to 0. And the reason for that, is this center point is the one from the origin that was projected to the sketch. And if you remember from the previous movie around origin geometry, the center point literally is the center of the universe. It is 000 on the coordinate system. Because that's projected to every single sketch, it's incredibly useful to mount geometry or lock geometry to that center point, so that it scales and sizes in a predictable fashion. I'm gonna start by left clicking on the center point, which will also create a coincident constraint at the same time. And now we're ready to create our first line. But, we have some head's up display that's presented. The first one, highlighted in blue, is the length of the line. If we want to, we can simply press "1" on our keyboard, and then "Tab" to switch to the other dimension, and you'll notice that our line is now exactly one inch long, there's a lock next to that dimension, indicating that we've manually entered something, and we switched over to the angle dimension, that if we wanted to, we could type in a value and lock this to a specific angle dimension as well. We're not gonna do that now, but what we're gonna do, is as we move, we're gonna move our cursor down closer to horizontal. And what's gonna happen, is when we get very close to horizontal, you'll notice this, it'll snap to horizontal. It's very light, and very minor, but you do feel or notice a snapping when it gets to horizontal. So we now have our line that's one inch long, and we're at a horizontal point, indicated by the horizontal icon at the end of the line. If we left click now, we will place the line, the dimension that we added, the one inch value, is automatically applied as a dimensional constraint. And, this line has a horizontal constraint as well. And just like before, we're ready to continue creating geometry. Now we're gonna go ahead and continue, and we're gonna drag this out till about a half inch or so, and as we move to what will become vertical, you'll notice something changes again. Here, we have a perpendicular constraint. So what's happening is, as you're drawing, Inventor is using the previously drawn piece of geometry to infer constraints from. Because you just drew this line that's horizontal, and now, you can see the head's up display says you're at a 90 degree angle from the previous line, it recognizes perpendicularity, and it's trying to apply that automatically. And that's fine in this case, so let's go ahead and left click to place that. We now have two lines, and they are perpendicular to each other. The first line is horizontal. As we continue drawing, in what would be a horizontal fashion, just like I mentioned before, the current line is using the previously drawn geometry to infer constraints. Again, we're at 90 degrees from the previously drawn line so it's inferring perpendicular. But now that we have multiple pieces of geometry on the screen, there might be times where we don't want this to be perpendicular to this line, but instead, parallel to the first line we created. To do that, we could go ahead and click this line, remove the perpendicular constraint, apply the horizontal constraint. But instead, there's a much easier way. We can simply move our cursor down and touch the line, or scrub on the line that we first drew, and now when we return to what was the perpendicular position, you'll notice that we have parallel constraints now. This allows you to very easily select what piece of geometry you want to infer constraints from. The other thing in the head's up display I wanted to show, was the automatic referencing of other geometry. If you move the cursor closer to what will be the mid point of the first line we created, you'll see that a dotted line is presented, indicating that we're in line with the mid-point of the first line that we drew. Now the dotted line doesn't imply that we're gonna constrain that in any way, it's just for visual alignment. So if we left click, we know that this line is now, right in line with this mid point. We can continue drawing geometry, and if we return to the original center point, the starting point from this sketch, we've closed this off to make a closed profile. You can also see all of the constraints that were applied. If we right click and select "Ok," we're now ready to apply 3D modeling actions to this, or, we can move geometry around, we can add other geometry, or, we can go ahead and, as I mentioned, turn this into a 3D model.

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