by Clint Brown
A handy tool for Plastic Moulding design, Casting design and anyone who is interested in Draft on their models, is the Draft Analysis tool in Autodesk Inventor.
The tool itself is very simple to use, and instantly give you visual feedback on your model, showing areas of no Draft in Red, and areas of draft in a sliding scale of colour based on the angle of the draft (see the image at the bottom of this blog post).
The animated GIF below show how to access the Draft Analysis tool (Inspect tab), and to then set a Pull direction. The Analysis itself is stored in the model browser in a Folder called Analysis. This folder stores all Draft analysis and other analysis tool results, such as Zebra or Section. You can toggle visibility on the folder, or activate individual analysis results by right clicking on them.
The draft angles used in this example are 3 and -3 degrees (depending on the feature) which is why the model goes from red (0 degrees) to blue and green.
Something for Geeks:
In the video, I use a very simple iLogic Rule to add draft angles to the extrude features. The changes are achieved through a simple Parameters edit, with an update at the end of the code.
The code looks like this:
d3 = -3 d9 = 3 d16 = -3
iLogicVb.UpdateWhenDone = True
d3, d9 and d16 are the default parameter names, that Inventor assigned to the draft parameters in the extrude features that I used to build the part.