From the course: Inventor 2016 Essential Training

Understanding work features - Inventor Tutorial

From the course: Inventor 2016 Essential Training

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Understanding work features

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- As we begin to finish up the sketching portion of the course and work our way towards part modeling, I wanted to pause for a moment and look at work planes and work features. You've already seen these being used throughout this course in different areas. Most specifically you've seen it in the Origin Geometry. The Origin Geometry can be find here in the upper left corner and if you click the plus symbol next to the Origin folder, you'll see the Origin Geometry which is made up of three planes, three axes, and a center point, which are all work features. If we zoom in to look at these a little more closely, you can see that we have several planes, several axes, and the center point. These are all work features. It just so happens that Inventor creates them for you for every single part. And you're gonna use work planes, in some manner, for every single part. The very first sketch you're gonna create will always be on one of these work planes. That doesn't mean you're gonna actually create work planes as you get started for every single part. What you're gonna find is that work planes will make certain designs easier and it will make some of the more complex designs possible in the first place. The best way for you to see this is for me to walk through an example. You don't need to understand all the details of what I'm doing here. This is a very high level overview just so can understand where work planes fit into the design process. What I'll do is I'll go ahead and start a new sketch and I'll select the work plane that I wanna sketch on. And I'm gonna create a bottle. The bottle will look something like a salad dressing bottle or maybe a shampoo bottle, and we'll look at how to create this in detail further on in the course, but I just wanted to show how work planes can facilitate design. I'm gonna start by creating an ellipse that will end up being the bottom of the bottle. And I'll finish that sketch. Now, I'll turn on the Origin Geometry that I used to create that because I do wanna use that piece of geometry. So, I'm gonna make that visible in the browser and we can continue on. Now, we could go to the work plane tool and simply select the work plane we wanna start from, left-click and drag, and you'll see that we're creating a work plane. We can now use that work plane to create another sketch. We can right-click, select new, and select the work plane we just created or go ahead and create an ellipse one more time and this time we'll make it a little bit larger and I'll finish that sketch. As a shortcut, what I'm gonna do is show you how to create a work plane using the sketch tool. This comes in really handy when you're building profiles like this for a loft because it allows you to simply tell the system you're gonna sketch, select a work plane, and left-click and drag on that. And you're gonna kill two birds with one stone by creating the work plane and creating a sketch on that work plane in the same action. I'm gonna go back to the circle command and here we'll make a circle that will become the bottom of the neck of the bottle. And I'll finish that sketch. I'll zoom out just a little bit because we'll do that one more time. We'll start a new sketch, we'll left-click and drag on this work plane, and then we'll create another circle. This time rather than drawing the circle, I'm simply gonna project it from the previous circle we created. We now have four different profiles on four different work planes that we can use to create a loft. If you look in the browser, you can see that sketch one is here on the first work plane. That's an origin plane. And then we have each of the work planes and sketches that we created in order to build this stack of sketches that we can use for our loft. If we go into the Loft command, we can simply select each of the profiles and the shape is created through those. By selecting Ok, you can see that we have created a basic shape here and we could go back and make modifications to each of those shapes to fine tune this, but I really just wanted to show how work planes are used to facilitate more complex design. Again, you might not use this for every single part other than the Origin Geometry you're gonna need to start from, but it's important to know that work features and work planes are available to you because they're gonna be points during a design process where it'll be incredibly beneficial to have them available.

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