Pattern a Compnent arround an ellipse

[Mike Y]

I need to build an assembly that has an ellipsoidal shell with some equally spaced internal spines that are tangental to the ellipse, as shown in the attached screenshot. This took me about 45 seconds to do in Autocad. The supports must be separate parts, not Inventor "rib" features - I need to count them in a BOM. I discovered that I could create a "rectangular" pattern of workpoint features around the inside edge of the ellipse, but when I return to the assembly environment and then try to select this pattern as the basis for patterning my rib components, I can't select it. Any suggestions out there?

Thank you,

[jonathan.landeros]

I need to build an assembly that has an ellipsoidal shell with some equally spaced internal spines that are tangental to the ellipse, as shown in the attached screenshot. This took me about 45 seconds to do in Autocad. The supports must be separate parts, not Inventor "rib" features - I need to count them in a BOM. I discovered that I could create a "rectangular" pattern of workpoint features around the inside edge of the ellipse, but when I return to the assembly environment and then try to select this pattern as the basis for patterning my rib components, I can't select it. Any suggestions out there?

Thank you,

It's not the 'perfect' solution, but you could use a sketch (in the ellipse shaped part) with work points to assemble the ribs in the right place.

Another thought (depending on how you need to assemble it) is to orient things around the origin planes. It might be another way to quickly assemble things in the right place.

[Ron Oldenbeuving]

See this post http://forums.augi.com/showthread.ph...012#post570012 on creating perpendiculer workplanes around a spline. It works for ellipses also, and you can then constrain to the workplanes.