Annoying behavior re: projected geometry

[Bishop]

I use a lot of projected construction lines in sketches, and then constrain my new - non-construction - geometry to them.

There's an issue I have, though, which is quite frankly annoying the living crap out of me, and i'm wondering if there's a way to make it stop.

Say I've projected the edges of a face of my part and I want to draw some lines from one edge to the other. I'll draw in a few lines, and then apply coincident constraints between the end points of the lines and the construction lines that I've projected. Thing is, though, the points will only constrain to the existing construction lines about half the time. The rest of the time they'll project new lines and connect to those instead. This leaves overlapping curves and open loops in profiles, and this in turn makes my blood pressure go up when I try and make use of the sketch.

I can't stop the first duplicate line from getting projected, but once that first one is there I can use Select Other to pick which of the two curves I want my constraint to go to, but that's really annoying to have to do, and wastes a bunch of time and mouse clicks - I'd really like to save the wear and tear on this mouse, they don't make it anymore.

Any way to make it only pick the existing projected line instead of creating a new one? Has anyone else ever noticed this happening?

[JD Mather]

Turn AutoProject Edges off.

[Bishop]

See, that'd be the obvious thing to do right? Already did that. I don't use autoproject for anything except the origin point.

[JD Mather]

I have never seen this behavior.
Can you attach a simple file here with projected geometry that you didn't project.

I assume you are aware that there are two options in Tools>Application Options>Sketch
Autoproject edges during curve creation (this is also on right mouse button in sketch environment - might accidently turn that on when using right mouse button).
Autoproject edges for sketch creation and edit.

also the dimension tool can autproject an edge. (I assume you are aware of all of this, but trying to cover all the bases.)

AutoProject.png

[Bishop]

Yep, I was aware of those options.

Take a look at sketch 3 in the attached. I projected the face of the cube as construction geometry, then ran a line through the middle, but not connected to either side. I added coincident constraints between the end points of the line and the projected construction geometry ... and got an extra curve projected, to which one end point of my line is attached. The other one worked correctly.


fun with projected geometry.ipt

[JD Mather]

Ha. I wasn't aware that Inventor 2013 would do that.
That is something SolidWorks users moving to Inventor have requested for years.

[Bishop]

Okay, great, so the SolidWorks nerds are going to be happy, but I'm annoyed. How do I make it not do that? Or at least, how do I make it behave the same way every time, so I can at least predict what's going to happen? Right now it's seemingly random. It took me several tries to make it happen when I wanted to make the demonstration, but when I don't want it to - i.e., at any other time - it happens anywhere from 10-50% of the time.

Incidentally, 2011 does the same thing. Don't know if 2012 does or not - I never spent much time with that. 2010 and 2009 didn't, though.