3D Hose tutorial

It's actually quite easy....make a cirkle on one plane ....then draw a 3D sketch with the start perpendicular to that plane....make a thin sweep. I have lot's of examples so I'll mail You a few

Krister L

"Aaron" skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@excite.com...

If I could give my humble opinion on the subject. We do a lot of cable layout drawings over here (coax), and gave up using 3d sketches: too cumbersome and hard to control. We create curves using "sketch on sketch" option. One sketch is the path on the "flat" plane (say Top plane), the second sketch is the path on the "vertical" plane (say Right plane). By vertical I mean that's where the cable changes elevation. Once the curve is created, it's just a matter of drawing the cross section of the cable on a plane normal to the curve, and sweeping that sketch along the curve. The path (in both cases) is made up of arcs, lines and sometimes splines. By dimensioning as much as possible the sketches, it allows easy "tweaking" of the path (route). I hope it helps. Best regards from Down Under.

I found your post on "sketch on sketch" option to drawing cabling very interesting. We do alot of copper tubing design. which require a lot of bending of our tubes in every freakin direction. We do alot of it by using the 3d sketch tool and agree that it is very cumbersome to control or edit later on. Could you please "enlighten" me some more on your "sketch on sketch" method.

John is talking about Projected Sketch Curves.

The Projected Sketch tool can create a 3D curve that represents the intersection of two extruded surfaces from sketches on two intersecting planes.

Sorry, I should have used the correct terminology in my post: sketch on sketch is an option in the 3D Curve command. Chapter 5 pages 18 & 19 of the 2004 Reference guide cover the subject of 3D curves. I have created a very simple example and placed screen shots in a Word doc. Can I email it to you using the address from your post? When creating the various sketches that make up the 3D curve, make sure that arcs or splines are tangent to the lines they connect to: the cross section you are sweeping along the curve, should always end up being planar to the curve (at start & end of the sweep). Otherwise, the next section of tube/cable/pipe you add will we "crooked"? Arlin mentions surfaces in his post. Again, we did use "sketch onto surface" option in 3D Curve command, but found that the surfaces created would mysteriously appear in the assemblies where the cables were used. Hiding the body of the surface is unstable for some reason. Bloody hard to try & explain that in a post. I hope I make sense !