Pella ThermaStar New Construction Window BIM Objects

It’s been a busy few days filled with computer crashes & glitches, email interviews, and a huge amount of hectic modeling behind-the-scenes on a big fat house model.

Thanks to help from Mark Flayler over at IMAGINiT, the big culprit behind all of the crashing I have been experiencing has been traced to the Autodesk Labs 3DA technology preview… which makes sense I guess. Technology previews are not finished work where most of the buggyness like this is ironed out before it gets added to a program, or —-in some cases just gets discarded. Think of Labs as a place where the programmers can throw their digital spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. Sometimes you get smacked right in the face, but safe is for sissy’s

The Make Components Crash Fix

For those of you that have installed the Inventor 3DA technology preview and are experiencing crashing upon using the Make Components command, just go to Tools>Options>Add-Ins, select Inventor 3DA from the list, then uncheck the Load On Startup and the Loaded/Unloaded checkboxes at the bottom of the dialog as shown below…

Note: the Add-In manager can also be found at Start>All Programs>Autodesk>Inventor 20XX>Tools>Add-In Manager. If a 3rd party Add-In ever gives you grief on start up, use this to shut the add-in down before starting. Be sure to check out the other stuff in the Tools folder as well while you’re there.

If the above action cures your problems, you may as well just uninstall the technology preview and reinstall when the next version comes out (if a next version comes out). On my install, I couldn’t find the program listed in Windows Programs and Features (used to be Add/Remove Programs), nor could I find it via a search of C: . I did find it though — under Start>All Programs>Inventor>Inventor 3DA>Uninstall (Inventor itself is under Autodesk).

Unfortunately, the cool little Steroidal Rectangle tool (I hate to call it the Centerpoint Rectangle tool as it does much more than that now) did not go as well. It is still missing from the ribbon, and generates a 1001 error (whatever the hell that is) when trying to uninstall (this one is located in the Programs and Features dialog in Windows 7).

Oh well. Time to move on.