This evolution included a design team with nearly 30 individuals involved through 10 cities and 3 continents. “Being able to “speak 3D” was the only language that worked,” says Peter Crawley, 3D Consultant from Autodesk reseller CADPRO Systems Ltd. “If 8 February 2016 we hadn’t used Inventor it would have meant in excess of 200,000 2D drawings each taking an average of 20 minutes for each drawing. “In detailing the glass, we realised that you can’t just thicken the surface model because you get big gaps as the triangles move round the outside of a curve,” says Crawley. An intelligent iLogic part was developed that looked at each triangle and its angle to each of its neighbours, which then sized the glass accordingly. This “true shape” of all 15,000 triangles was then used to ‘profile cut’ the glass. “We decided to produce 2D drawings for in three dimensions checking purposes.” A special program was developed inside Inventor that saved thousands of hours of repetitive 2D detailing work,” says Dent, who added “It’s just a shame we couldn’t check them as quickly!” After managing to get the glass ordered, the window frames needed building. The size of every triangle was automatically extracted to a spreadsheet, which fed a new Inventor iLogic window frame assembly. “We didn’t model every frame, there was no point,” says Crawley. “We just created a few hundred for clash detection with the steel.” Autodesk Inventor was particularly useful when it came to analysing how the various glazing components came together at a junction or a node point. The junction between the glazing triangles is essentially a six sided node like a hexagon. “A junction appears to work when it’s illustrated on a 2D drawing,” says Crawley. “But when you have a look at it in three dimensions F E A T U R E
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