OkiePC
Lifetime Supporting Member
This is long winded, so just read the bold if you're in a hurry!
At work, I am now the default mechanical draftsman.
I have to create about 5 or six mechanical drawings a week, usually from a blurry pdf scanned from a hand drawing or an actual part.
Most of them are shafts or flanged bushings. Some are simple, some are complicated, like UHMW bushings with special slots and flanges with hole patters.
Some are more like sheetmetal drawings, for covers and plates and brackets.
I have had the full license for Mechanical 2010 for a few months, and never took a 3D Autocad class. In '96 I took a very good 40 hour vo-tech class using rev 14, and taught myself since then. When I started here, I jumped from Autocad 2000 standard edition at my old job, and LT98 (Autocad Lite) to Autcad 2004 Standard here, then two years ago I got 2008 Electrical, but none of our existing drawings use the components from electrical, so I still use my old library of objects I have been using since I used AutoCad LT98 for five years successfully at my old job.
So, I have drawn a few 3D shafts and modeled a few bushing by trial and error, and sometime I give up and just make two and three view drawings with rectangles and dimensions.
I know I am close to becoming a productive 3-D modeler, but I still need a class, or a good tutorial.
There are some fundamentals missing from my Autocad skillset, I am sure of it but don't know what they are. Here are some questions for Autocad 2010 Mechanical Users:
1)I know how to use the viewports, and 3-D view, and orbit, but how do I switch the default plane that my drawn objects will be inserted without having to change views? Basically, I want to rotate the User Coordinate System with respect to the model, so X and Z or Y and Z are swapped. So when I draw a cylinder to create a pipe or a shaft, I can draw the objects that are parallel from one view, rotate the coordinate system into the Z plane without changing my view of the object, and then insert all the cylinders that are 90 degrees to the first one, and so on and so forth.
I never needed that for electrical drawings. Now that I have typed out this question, I seem to recall seeing "Rotate UCS" on one of the main menus ... doh!
2)Don't they have 3-D key slots and tapped holes? I modeled a plate and had dropped in the Component list ANSI-UNC 1-4” 20 TPI into the model, arrayed it to my 16 bolt pattern, and then viewed it from an isometric (ISO) angle and found out the threads were 2-d objects, and some were on a plane 3 feet above the plate! So somehow, I moved the origin of where I was drawing and it followed me from top view to one of the isometric views, and then back to top view, my z was at a different height, unbeknownst to me until I switch views again. For the keys lots, I just exploded them and used push/pull and subtract but those are all wasted steps.
I got around this "top view design, wrong z plane" problem by putting in a PIP (picture in picture) of an ISO viewport and glancing at it all the time, but I appear to be missing a fundamental grasp of controlling the 3d position and 3-d rotation of the UCS.
3)I needed to draw a guide rail 60 inches long, 1/2” round stainless steel with a bend at the last 20 inches. I drew the straight section as a cylinder, and then drew a spline for my curve from its end center point (since the built in library of round stock is a script that generates 2D). Then I rotated views and drew a circle on the end of the spline and used the sweep command to draw the curved shaft by sweeping the circle along the spline. It is now a 3-d object according to the properties, but in the MODEL tab it renders as a wireframe and strangely, only has one “wire” running between the two circles at the end of the spline (curved line). When I switch to a front view, I get two “wires”, top and bottom of the bend and it looks normal. All other views, it looks like a piece of wire with two 1/2” diameter hoops on each end. I can, however, see the actual 3-d solid that was generated if I type RENDER on the command line. I can't find a render dialog box and don't know the commands.Can't I change the wire frame settings of individual objects or for the whole model tab drawing environment?
4)Should I put the template I am using on the model tab, or only on a layout, with viewports? The latter seems to work better, but still has some drawbacks, but my whole life I have been drawing electrical ladder drawings by starting out with a sheet template on the Model tab and drawing inside it.
5)The Power-Dimension. How in the world can I control the STYLE especially SCALE of the "power dimensions" I have already created? I figured out a crude way to make the text bigger, one dimension at a time, but I haven't found where I can scale the whole power-dimension STYLE if there is such a thing.
My only official Autocad class was in '96 on rev.14. It was a very good class, and I came out of it very comfortable with the keyboard commands and the menu driven organization, but it ended with a mere intro to 3d modeling. I am too advanced to take a level 2 type of AutoCad class because I have learned on the job intermittently for 15 years. So, I am thinking of ordering some DVD tutorials so I can learn at my own pace and jump to subjects on an as needed basis. Any recommendations for training materials and especially online resources is appreciated.
I have used some Autocad forums for very specific issues with good results. I have looked but not found any local in-person classes that fit the bill. I need a curriculum from which to learn modeling at a fast pace that covers the bases from the ground up.
Surely I am just a few basic commands and 3-D libraries away from being proficient with modeling. It should be faster than drawing in 2D to represent shafts, bushings with slots and flanges with bolt patterns. Things like that are very time consuming in 2D for me, and 3D isn't much faster for me yet, but it's getting there.
TIA
Paul
At work, I am now the default mechanical draftsman.
I have to create about 5 or six mechanical drawings a week, usually from a blurry pdf scanned from a hand drawing or an actual part.
Most of them are shafts or flanged bushings. Some are simple, some are complicated, like UHMW bushings with special slots and flanges with hole patters.
Some are more like sheetmetal drawings, for covers and plates and brackets.
I have had the full license for Mechanical 2010 for a few months, and never took a 3D Autocad class. In '96 I took a very good 40 hour vo-tech class using rev 14, and taught myself since then. When I started here, I jumped from Autocad 2000 standard edition at my old job, and LT98 (Autocad Lite) to Autcad 2004 Standard here, then two years ago I got 2008 Electrical, but none of our existing drawings use the components from electrical, so I still use my old library of objects I have been using since I used AutoCad LT98 for five years successfully at my old job.
So, I have drawn a few 3D shafts and modeled a few bushing by trial and error, and sometime I give up and just make two and three view drawings with rectangles and dimensions.
I know I am close to becoming a productive 3-D modeler, but I still need a class, or a good tutorial.
There are some fundamentals missing from my Autocad skillset, I am sure of it but don't know what they are. Here are some questions for Autocad 2010 Mechanical Users:
1)I know how to use the viewports, and 3-D view, and orbit, but how do I switch the default plane that my drawn objects will be inserted without having to change views? Basically, I want to rotate the User Coordinate System with respect to the model, so X and Z or Y and Z are swapped. So when I draw a cylinder to create a pipe or a shaft, I can draw the objects that are parallel from one view, rotate the coordinate system into the Z plane without changing my view of the object, and then insert all the cylinders that are 90 degrees to the first one, and so on and so forth.
I never needed that for electrical drawings. Now that I have typed out this question, I seem to recall seeing "Rotate UCS" on one of the main menus ... doh!
2)Don't they have 3-D key slots and tapped holes? I modeled a plate and had dropped in the Component list ANSI-UNC 1-4” 20 TPI into the model, arrayed it to my 16 bolt pattern, and then viewed it from an isometric (ISO) angle and found out the threads were 2-d objects, and some were on a plane 3 feet above the plate! So somehow, I moved the origin of where I was drawing and it followed me from top view to one of the isometric views, and then back to top view, my z was at a different height, unbeknownst to me until I switch views again. For the keys lots, I just exploded them and used push/pull and subtract but those are all wasted steps.
I got around this "top view design, wrong z plane" problem by putting in a PIP (picture in picture) of an ISO viewport and glancing at it all the time, but I appear to be missing a fundamental grasp of controlling the 3d position and 3-d rotation of the UCS.
3)I needed to draw a guide rail 60 inches long, 1/2” round stainless steel with a bend at the last 20 inches. I drew the straight section as a cylinder, and then drew a spline for my curve from its end center point (since the built in library of round stock is a script that generates 2D). Then I rotated views and drew a circle on the end of the spline and used the sweep command to draw the curved shaft by sweeping the circle along the spline. It is now a 3-d object according to the properties, but in the MODEL tab it renders as a wireframe and strangely, only has one “wire” running between the two circles at the end of the spline (curved line). When I switch to a front view, I get two “wires”, top and bottom of the bend and it looks normal. All other views, it looks like a piece of wire with two 1/2” diameter hoops on each end. I can, however, see the actual 3-d solid that was generated if I type RENDER on the command line. I can't find a render dialog box and don't know the commands.Can't I change the wire frame settings of individual objects or for the whole model tab drawing environment?
4)Should I put the template I am using on the model tab, or only on a layout, with viewports? The latter seems to work better, but still has some drawbacks, but my whole life I have been drawing electrical ladder drawings by starting out with a sheet template on the Model tab and drawing inside it.
5)The Power-Dimension. How in the world can I control the STYLE especially SCALE of the "power dimensions" I have already created? I figured out a crude way to make the text bigger, one dimension at a time, but I haven't found where I can scale the whole power-dimension STYLE if there is such a thing.
My only official Autocad class was in '96 on rev.14. It was a very good class, and I came out of it very comfortable with the keyboard commands and the menu driven organization, but it ended with a mere intro to 3d modeling. I am too advanced to take a level 2 type of AutoCad class because I have learned on the job intermittently for 15 years. So, I am thinking of ordering some DVD tutorials so I can learn at my own pace and jump to subjects on an as needed basis. Any recommendations for training materials and especially online resources is appreciated.
I have used some Autocad forums for very specific issues with good results. I have looked but not found any local in-person classes that fit the bill. I need a curriculum from which to learn modeling at a fast pace that covers the bases from the ground up.
Surely I am just a few basic commands and 3-D libraries away from being proficient with modeling. It should be faster than drawing in 2D to represent shafts, bushings with slots and flanges with bolt patterns. Things like that are very time consuming in 2D for me, and 3D isn't much faster for me yet, but it's getting there.
TIA
Paul