I do not know what is happening this year but the whole world seems to have gone MAD!! Everyone is busy busy busy and there seems to be no rest for the wicked (or good). I recently worked on a project this week and basically the design we are doing is drainage channels.
No problem. One size throughout the channel, we can do an extrude. Well no… I couldn’t because the profile on the one end was smaller than the profile on the other end. No problem. Two different profiles we can use the sweep command.
So there we have the channel. Need to cut it into manageable chunks, lets use some workplanes and split. Awesome we are getting somewhere. At this moment I heard a faint sound coming from behind me. an ominous sound…dum dum DAAAAA. Now I needed to put some flanges in between the pieces of channel.
No problem. Create the flange and create the copies of the flange along the channel with the Rectangular Pattern. PROBLEM!!!! The flange needs to change height as it passes along the path between the 2 profiles. So what do we use, iLogic maybe?? Then I remembered a technology that was introduced in about Inventor 2011 or 2012. Yes you guessed it (or maybe you didn’t) iCopy. (what is with Inventor and all these i thingies!!?!)
To explain iCopy think of one of those olden day painters ladders which starts off wide at the bottom and narrows as it goes to the top with the landing for your paints. Those rungs are all the same but only the width changes. The traditional pattern will make exact copies whereas iCopy will change the width or height or length, depending on how you have set your parameters.