When creating advanced or complex Inventor sketch profiles, it is sometimes helpful to change the display properties of the sketch geometry. Inventor provides some basic options for this … Center Lines, Construction Lines, Reference (Projected) Geometry, and Normal Geometry. Under most conditions these options are all you need, however when you build sketches that will be shared, or used as layout information in skeleton modeling, having visual clues to what the geometry represents can be helpful (think AutoCAD Layers).
To access and set the properties of objects (lines, arcs, circles) in a sketch you have several options available to you.
Tool bar access via a Drop-Down menu
Right Click on either the Sketch in the Browser or on the individual objects and select Properties from the menu.
Work Flow
In this example we have several sketch profiles defined in shared sketch. To make it easier for other users to visualize the different profile information we will change the color and line styles of the objects in the sketch.
Starting with the rectangle on the left, we select the 4 lines, then right mouse click to select “Properties”. In this example the Color, Line type and Line Weight were adjusted.
In the next example we will display the bolt circle as a center line. Currently the Inventor Center Line sketch style does not support Circles or Arcs. In this example an additional change was added by activating Scale to control the size of the displayed Line Style.
Now that we have adjusted the visual characteristics of the sketch it is easier for the end user to determine the purpose and relationships of the different objects.
After setting the display characteristics of the sketch objects, you can toggle the display using the “Show Format” option from the ribbon bar.
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