How to handle falls in flooring ?

[nbonniot]

Hello,

I just jumped from Inventor to Creo Parametric 4. After following beginners tutorials, my goal for starting up my projects are the following

• Prepare a part (such as floating floor board) to be used, modify and placed easily with component interface in another assembly.
• Use this part in pattern : I would like to reproduce real life situation, meaning
  1. Placing complete boards
  2. Placing row last board with a cut and a fall
  3. Reuse this fall as next row beginning

Is there a way to achive this, with interface components user defined functions and relation/scripting?

Thansk for your answers/leads

[dgschaefer]

Yes, this is possible, but not necessarily simple.

One way to do this would be family tables, but the table would quickly get very large and burdensome. I think using a master part plus inheritance features in child parts would do the trick.  I'm not going to go into the how to on each feature I'm suggesting, I'll leave learning them up to you.

Start by creating a master part that represents the full board, out of the box.  Place that in your assy every time you need a full board.  

At the end of each row, create a new part and use the inheritance feature to import the full board part.  This will be a generic, name it something like row_1-2, meaning end part for row 1, start part for row 2.

In that part create a datum plane offset from the end representing the length needed for the end of the row.  Use the solidify feature to cut off the "fall".

Suppress that solidify and create a new solidify feature cutting the other way, creating the "fall" part.

Now, create a family table and add both solidify features.  Create two instances, one with the cut creating the end piece and one with the cut creating the fall piece.  You now have the parts you need for row 1.

For the remaining rows, you can simply make a copy of the initial master part, change the offset of the datum plane and rename the instances.  This will give you a cut piece and the "fall" for each row.  Depending on you accurate you are after, you may want to add a second cut representing the saw kerf as well.

I'm sure someone else might have a more clever way of doing this, but this would be my approach.  Interesting challenge.

[nbonniot]

Thanks for you detailled answer and leads. I will go deeper in several concepts you mentionned that I don't master yet (inheritance mechanism for example).

I will try something ASAP and if you're OK will be back here if I'm stuck or need further explanation on specific point.

Thanks,

Nicolas

[dgschaefer]

Inheritance features are pretty simple, you'll find them under the data sharing menu in the part.  They simply bring in the geometry of one part into another.  It's possible that you need to have advanced assembly to use them, however.

If your main board isn't going to change, you could simply make a copy of it and go from there.  Your end pieces then won't be tied to your master, however.

[BenLoosli]

Doug knows more about inheritence features than I do, so his answer will work.

I would look at the projetct and determine if this is a one-time thing or something that needs to be done on multiple projects. For a one-time project, I would just use family tables to get the different lengths and place them together to make the floor.

One other way to do it would be to just place full boards, and then trim them all to the room size. The fall of row A to be the beginning of row B would just be calculated and then that new board placed with an offset for the fall length.

You did mention pattern, if after placing X boards, you are back to starting with a full board on row Y, you could group all of the prior rows and then pattern them to fall into place after the Y-1 row.