This post is a bit off-topic as it relates to the normal woodworking genre on this site, but a great deal of the visitors here are not woodworkers, and I myself have a good deal of experience in designing metal structures (I used to design Mega Yachts before the Great Recession) –so I’ve decided to post some sheet metal structure stuff. It’s about a quickie study model I created to solve a design problem a manufacturer had with exploding sheet metal structure assemblies…
Category Archives: Autodesk Inventor
Inventor Simplification IP Removal – Autodesk Labs
Just a quick post to let everyone know about a new offering for Inventor Simplification at Autodesk Labs. It purports to be Shrinkwrap on steroids, and judging from the video, that may be true.
Anything that helps protect Intellectual Property is a welcome addition to Inventor. I will run the plug-in through some tests and report the results here –most likely over the coming weekend. You can find the download over at labs if you want to give Inventor Simplification a shot.
Autodesk Inventor Now Integral Part of TigerStop Workflow
I just heard from Richard over at TigerStop, and he informs me that their software engineers are going to make the Autodesk Inventor .csv output a default profile in TigerStop’s Workflow Manager!
What this means for us Inventor users is that there will be no farting around configuring things in TigerStop’s software, all we will have to do is pick Autodesk Inventor from the list of programs during setup, and we are on our way. Sweet!
Now the thing to do is figure out a reliable way to automate the output from Inventor via iLogic, and maybe some additional help from the Inventor API –possibly triggered by the Rev. number? I could see having a company’s drawing templates having a Rev number set to -1 until RTM, at which point the trigger would be pulled and the Rev number would go to 0 –which would fire an iLogic rule that send the cutlists to the queue. If that can be done relatively easy, even smaller shops could implement the start of their own mini ERP systems!
I imagine the code would look similar to this…
Autodesk Labs Mesh Enabler (Catia Importer) – Kicking the Tires
I moseyed on over to Autodesk Labs today to see if they had any goodies to try out. For the uninitiated, Labs is the place where Autodesk places new technologies previews in order to get feedback from the public.
When I got there I switched over to the Inventor section to see if there was anything new since the last time I visited…..and indeed there were several new technology trials, as well as a few plug-ins. I’ll check them all out eventually and post the details here, but for now, a few words on the Mesh Enabler for Inventor technology preview.
As I said in a earlier post Rhino Import Translator for Autodesk Inventor, this importer is likely to solve some headaches in companies that are transitioning to Inventor, but still have a seat or two of some gosh-awful expensive old-school swoopy surface software. Converting files can be a huge headache, and if the one guy who can do it seems to be away from work more than at work, it can truly be a nightmare (been there).
Which is where Inventor comes to the rescue. Inventor now has more import formats than you can shake a stick at. The addition of the Rhino importer was a big one for me as I was working with ship hulls that were created in Rhino and Rhino Marine by the Naval Architects, but I’m sure there are tons of folks out there that need to convert Catia files. Remember, there is no guarantee that this experimental software will ever see the light of day outside of Labs, but I would bet my bottom dollar it will part of Inventor as soon as the wrinkles are ironed out. that’s the MO at least.
Which brings up an interesting fact. There are stand-alone convertors and conversion services out there that cost a hell of a lot more than a seat of Inventor (especially Inventor Lt which is about a fifth of the price of the full-blown Inventor Suites). Check out the comparison of file import capabilities in the image below that compares the screen capture from my January 2010 post to one I just captured today…
Inventor Color and Materials Creation Tutorial
In the last installment of this tutorial, we left off with the Shaker Table having a new Inventor Material and Color applied, but things look all caddywhompus due to the way Autodesk Inventor color is applied. In this post we will fix the colors to make everything look copasetic…
Like almost every function in Autodesk Inventor, there more than one way to skin this cat. Inventor color overrides can be applied at the feature level by right clicking on a feature in the Browser Bar, or by doing the same to a solid body in the Solid Bodies folder –which would add the override to all of the features contained within said solid, or by selecting one or more faces in the modeling environment.
For this exercise, we will be using the third method, selecting faces. What you need to do is select all (or as many as you can in one go) faces that have the grain going the wrong way by selecting the first face, then holding down the Ctrl key and selecting more. When you have them all, or as many as you can, right click anywhere in the modeling environment and choose Properties…
ERP for the Cabinetmaker
Sorry for the lack of content, but I put this page up at a moments notice to display some of the progress I am making developing a ERP friendly modeling paradigm for Autodesk Inventor with iLogic. For now, the YouTube video below has some info, and if you follow the link to my YouTube site, there is a pretty good description there.
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