Curve creation - Siemens NX Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, I'm just gonna talk about the various curve creation tools that the sketcher has. So I'm gonna go ahead and quickly make a new sketch inside of this file. This is a brand new part file. There's nothing in it, except for all of the default coordinate systems and settings and everything. So I'm gonna go and create my sketch on plane with my horizontal and origin, use just the Work Part. Select OK. Now that I'm in the sketch, once again when you create a new sketch it puts you into the profile tool. Now to use this profile tool, it's pretty straight forward. You pick a point that you wanna start out at. So you'll notice I can either enter in the coordinate system or just simply pick a point. The moment pick a point you'll see that the input mode changes. Now it's asking for a length or an angle. And here I can either just draw another point or enter in the values that I want. Because this is the sketch, because we're gonna come back later on and apply constraints, we don't necessarily have to pay close attention to the input fields. So for this, I'm just gonna click away at random points out in space. Now once I select my first point, again it's just a click, it's not click and hold, you're not dragging. So for this, I'm gonna move my mouse over and you'll note that if I click right there what'll happen is the line will constrain to the horizontal of the sketch. If you look down below in the Q line, where it says press MB2 to lock horizontal constraint, basically that's telling you if I click the middle mouse button, or the wheel, it'll lock it at horizontal. And that little orange arrow that you see appearing right next to the cursor is indicating that upon creation of the line it's gonna snap to horizontal. For this, I'm just gonna simply come back across and pick a point. You'll notice that as soon as I draw that in a couple of things happen. I get my horizontal constraint, that's what this little blue little dash is telling me. And I also get this light gray or lightish blue constraint that appears. And this is what's called an auto dimension. So as you draw things inside of NX, the auto dimensioning basically just starts putting dimensions, guessing, placing things everywhere and what it ends up with is technically a fully defined, a fully constrained sketch but with automatically generated constraints. We're gonna talk about this in a later video as far as how we go about adjusting these constraints but for now I just wanna talk about create curves. So I've picked a couple of points and I'm gonna come down and pick another point. You'll see I get another constraint. There's my vertical, there is my auto dimension. Now if I click at an angle, you'll notice that I have an angle constraint and a length as well I don't have another symbol here 'cause there's not symbol to be had. So I'm just gonna move this up a bit and I'm gonna move, come down, I can come in either direction. You can see now if I snap here you'll see that the previous line drawn is now highlighted in orange. This is indicating that it wants to create a constraint to that previous line. And you'll see again by the cursor I have what's shown as the perpendicular constraint. So the system is automatically trying to generate constraints as you draw things. Now if I click you'll see here I get my perpendicular constraint, there's my auto constraint. I come up, come to the end point and I know I'm giving you the end point because you'll see that little red diamond appear so it's snapping to that end point and this is where the selection intent is really important. So if I pay attention to my selection intent, you'll notice it says hey, I'm snapping two endpoints. This is allowing me to snap to endpoints. So when I got there, it's snapping to that endpoint. Now you'll also note that if I hover I get this little quick pick that pops up, those little three dots it's called a quick pick. If I pick, I get a little listing window of the available locations of where I want to drop my endpoint. I can say start point of line or point on curve. They're two different things. If I say point on curve that means that endpoint can travel along the length of the curve whereas if I say at start point it's going to be locked in coincident to that endpoint or start point in this case. Now you'll notice I still have my little rubber band effect and as I draw you can see just moving my mouse I have potential to make that line parallel to this line here. You can see that it wants to highlight that line and say parallel. Again, the little parallel constraint appears. If you are trying to draw a line and don't want any auto constraints, you can hold the alt key down on the keyboard and you'll notice that no constraints pop up. The alt key is a way of saying I don't want any constraints as I draw. And this is important because often times you're drawing in tight little areas and you have a lot of geometry all around and things wanna snap to and you don't want things to snap to, so just hold the alt key down on the keyboard and you have your ability to not apply any constraints as you're drawing. Alright, so I'm gonna finish off that profile and just gonna move this over. If I come in now, go back into profiles, other things that I can do with it, I'm gonna draw another line. If I want an arc right now at the very end I can do one of two things. If I click and drag and I still have my mouse button held down but as soon as I release it, it's gonna remember that I'm drawing an arc. So now I'm no longer holding the mouse button down. You can see I have an arc and I get this little dial indicator, I can now based off of where I come pass through I can get different arcs, different directions. Here's one tangent. If I accidentally got an arc, I didn't want one, I can just come back over here to profile, select on the line function and it switches it back to line. Just that easy. Pick my line and I'm in. If I do want an arc I can always come back in and say I wanna draw an arc. And you'll notice that it switches it back to arc. So I can either click and drag or I can use these buttons over here to change the type of line or arc or curve that I'm drawing. Go ahead and put that arc down. Draw the next line. Come over and you'll see as I'm drawing I get these little help lines. This is indicating that these two endpoints, this little dash line, very faint dotted line running vertical is indicating that the two endpoints will be vertically in the same position. So come down and close that out. Once I'm done drawing my profile I can do, again, one of two things, I can either turn off the profile by hitting that icon, hitting the X here, or I can hit escape on the keyboard as well a couple times and it gets rid of everything. So that's basically drawing your profile. As far as rectangle go, pretty straight forward. Come in, you have three different methods of drawing a rectangle, two diagonal points. You have by three points and you have again, from center and it's with three points. So if I use two diagonal points, you can see diagonal point one, diagonal point two, I have my horizontal constraint, a bunch of perpendiculars. If I go by three points, point one, point two, that sets the angle and then that third point sets the width or the heighth of that rectangle. You have various options for that here. Again, I'll just close that out and I'm just gonna control Z, I'm gonna undo these profiles take me back to a clean slate. Drawing lines similar to the profile but you'll notice that I don't have the arc function here. Just pick point to point, point to point. If I want to I can pick again an end point, remember that little red diamond that pops up is indicating that I'm actually constraining right to that endpoint. It's gonna automatically associate it to that endpoint. Again, that's that selection intent. If I want, let's say, a middle point, I can come over here to that midpoint. You'll notice that it wants to snap to that midpoint as soon as I get near it. You'll see it snaps up there. So that means that I'm constraining to that midpoint. Depending upon where I draw my next line I can either get it perpendicular to there or if I'm real careful you'll notice I have a parallel constraint to that top line. So, as you're drawing you really wanna pay attention to where you're drawing 'cause it's easy, very, very easy to accidentally get a constraint that you may not want. I'll be talking about constraints in later videos. We'll show you how you can delete them, change them, apply dimensional constraints, geometric constraints. As far as some of the other options that we have here for drawing curves, you can go to arc, you'll notice you have three point arc, and arc by center and endpoints. So, if you need three point arc, you can pick your start point based off of the second point what you draw, how you draw, determines the type of arc you get. If I come back between those two end points you'll notice I get a start and then midpoint. If I go past that point you'll notice it's three points in a row to get that arc. I'm just gonna control Z on the keyboard to undo that. I also have arc center and end points and this allows me to pick my arc center and then start point and end point for that arc. Circle, pretty straight forward. Circle by center and diameter as well as by three points. So just the way you created arcs, you create circles but it will close off and make a complete circle. So if I were to three points, one, two, and three, You'll notice I have that complete circle. You'll also notice I have a gallery full of additional ways to create curves. So you have polygons and spines and all sorts of stuff. These are all great tools. Get yourself familiar with creating the basic curves first so you understand exactly what you're doing before you start getting into some of those advanced tools because there's a lot of little tricky bits here and there for some of those other curve functions in the gallery. So, just really get yourself familiar with what's going on. Get yourself familiar with the additional menus that pop up and how you go about using these basic curve tools. You should basically be able to cover almost every curve that you need with these, or profile that you need with these tools up here.