Linear Step and Repeat & Design Tables

Does anyone know how to link the number of instances in a linear step
and repeat inside the design table.

 

Hello towarts you Jeff.

Yes can it be done. For the many times I know I have too done it.

Mak for youself one of feature pattern, then to click-click upon features
tree. Behold now it shows these dimension you are for use in you table also
too repeats. Next, use of repeats name in you desing table only for to tell
the table you number of repeating and this many it makes.

Ops - now am I think you need skech repeats for which I am not know, but for
features it made for to work. What I possible mean is worng advise I give
you.

Sincerefully,

Habib

 

I can't compete with Mr. Habib for entertainment. Well said, Habib!
Whatever it is that you said.

Anyway, I'll agree with him on using feature patterns rather than sketch
step and repeat. Sketch patterns are slow by comparison. I don't think
there's a way to link to the number in a sketch pattern. I think it's one
of those features SW added so that Autocad couldn't say that SW doesn't
have a 2D patterning tool. It doesn't work like anything else in SW, and I
don't think it has been improved since it was added. I've never used it
for a real design, I always use feature patterning.


matt



(Jeff Parker) wrote in @posting.google.com:

 

Matt,

I understand the performance hit that the 2D patterns cause over feature
patterns but I use them because I like to use the sketch to position and
control the size of my pattern. Example would be a rectangular bolt
pattern centered on a plate .5" from each edge, should the plate size
change the pattern follows. I would love to use feature patterns for
performance but need a similar technique, any ideas?

RAD

 

Yeah, a sketch driven pattern might be a nice way to do that and have the
number of holes change with the length of the edge, but as you've pointed
out, there's no way to drive the number of holes with a sketch pattern.

So a workable alternative would be a feature pattern with equations, or
mirror if that's what you're doing anyway.

A sketch pattern with a bunch of points, if that's what you're doing, is
fairly harmless. The real speed problem comes when you pattern something
with a lot of sketch relations, like a hexagon.

 

The main reason I asked is because of the file size difference between
a feature pattern and a sketch pattern. I made the same part using
both techniques and here is what I got:

Featured Part = 1.6MB
Sketched Part = 286K

I still think that this functionality could be added realitvly easy.

 

That's interesting. If you go to Matt's site <
http://www.frontiernet.net/~mlombard/ > and look at his Rules of Thumb note
on patterns, you'll see that he generally found the sketched patterns to
result in larger files. His test cases had a lot of instances. Did yours
have just a few? Perhaps that would be the difference.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Here is the issue, I am patterning extrude features not cut features.
I just did the test on all 16 versions of the model I am trying to
create and the featured was still smaller.

But that is not the point of this posting, I just wanted a way to
drive the sketch pattern with an equation. But now I know for sure
that it is not possible because of no dimension driving the number of
instances like the feature pattern has.