Discover how parametric modeling can improve your design workflow, specifically when adjusting the position of objects within your model. This article outlines the process of moving a model, such as a lamp, and ensuring all components accurately update to reflect the new position.
Key Insights
- The article guides readers on how to adjust and capture the position of models using parametric modeling. It emphasizes the importance of checking in small increments to ensure a successful update.
- It highlights the issue of a model's component, in this case, the power cord, not updating with the rest of the model. The solution involves dragging the timeline prior to the capture position, allowing the model to automatically compute and redraw the component into position.
- The article also introduces the concept of suppressing and unsuppressing features. This allows for models to be positioned in multiple ways, useful for different rendering views or design evaluation purposes.
In this video, we will move the position of our lamp and look at how to use the timeline and parametric modeling to update the position of the objects in our model. I will scroll down and open up step 14, capture position.
Once your model is open, go ahead and hide your data panel. And let's look at our model. We know that we have our joints associated so that our model will hinge here, here, here, and this will stay up and down.
Also, we've grounded the base and the base of our switch so that we can activate our switch. When I move my model around, we should see the lamp move into different positions. This is very cool and helps us understand how to better design our model.
However, we can see that our power cord is not updating with our model. This is a problem, especially if we move our lamp into a weird position and want to do something like a rendering. I will revert my position.
And let's look first at moving my lamp a very small amount. I'll grab the edge of my lampshade arm here and just drag it slightly down. We can see we've changed the angle of all of our arms.
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And when I capture the position, none of the power cord goes through any of the holes associated. We can see that by dragging the timeline back before the capture position, the position goes back into place. Also, dragging it once more before this group, we can see that the power cord now has not been created.
Let's move back and now drag this capture position before the group. Our model will automatically compute and will redraw the power cord into position. I'll orbit around so that we can see that more clearly.
Fusion has updated the power cord because of its parametric modeling. Because even though we drew the power cord before we moved the position, because we dragged the position before the power cord, if I move my timeline slider here, it looks like there's no power cord drawn. Now if I expand this group and look at my sketches, we can see that the sketches are now moved into the appropriate position because of the constraints and dimensions we have applied.
The midplane has moved its position, and the rest of the sketches have moved into their appropriate locations. I'll hide the sketches again and collapse the group. We can now delete this position, and our model will snap back into place.
This is a great workflow when trying to better understand how our model will update parametrically. It is best to check in small increments what your sweep will be able to do. Notice I'm moving this slowly back into position, capturing the position, and then seeing if the sweep will update.
At a certain point, my sweep will fail. This is because the angle has been created too harsh and will not update. However, I can see by dragging my model, I can redraw my sweep.
I can also type in 1, and it will sweep the entire distance. Now that I know that this position is where I want, I can delete the previous positions before my most recent capture position. This will allow the model to update to that position without needing to first calculate those first two positions.
Or by keeping all positions, I can project each one of those to the front, depending on when I need that position in view, again, for a rendering or another reason. I can also select and suppress these features so that they are not viewed in my model, but they have not been deleted. Now I can right-click, Unsuppress Feature, and the model will snap back into that position.
This allows me to position my lamp in multiple ways. And then by suppressing and unsuppressing those features, I can put my lamp into different locations for renderings or other reasons. I will suppress these three positions.
And let's put our lamp into an unreasonable position and see our sweep break. I will move this somewhere like this and capture the position. I'll move it before my group, and we will see the sweep fail.
Notice my distance says 1. My profile and path are correct, but it says the body would intersect itself. Sometimes we can move this geometry into positions that would not work with the sweep. We need to be careful to be actively checking in small increments what will work and what will not.
I will undo that capture position. And I will revert my model. And I can go to my home view.
Go ahead and save your file. And you will notice in the step 15 final, I have simply placed the lampshade in a fun position. If you open that file, you will see that I have placed the capture position in the model that I can suppress to revert my model back to the original position.
Go ahead and play around with your final model changing position. And when you are satisfied, go ahead and save.
