Revit Interoperability in Inventor 2014!

Revit Interoperability in Inventor 2014 Revit Interoperability has been part of Autodesk Inventor for some time now, but the newest version of Inventor, Inventor 2014, has upped the ante a bit by adding tools to simplify parts and assemblies for … Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Placing Cabinet Configurators

I’ve just posted the second video in a series of videos about our Cabinet Configurator Package showing the placement of the Cabinet Configurators within the previously placed job model. The blog post will follow on the ADI site in a … Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Solid Body-Palooza is a Go!

                      Break out the champagne! The status of the Solid Body-Palooza solid body workflow enhancements status has been changed to accepted! I couldn’t find a legend on the IdeaStation where … Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Room Configurator for Cabinetmakers Video Posted on YouTube

I just posted a video showing the creation of a cabinet job using a Room Configurator on YouTube, and have embedded it below…       There will be more videos as well as articles in this series, all of which … Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Multi-Solid Body Workflow Update!

Multi-Solid Body Workflow Although the voting has not quite met the two million ‘Kudos‘ I was shooting for, (yet), the campaign to get Autodesk to do SOMETHING to improve the multi-solid body workflow has taken a turn for the better! … Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Automated Cabinetmaking Design Tutorial – iLogic Coding

iLogic Coding for the Face Frame Count The iLogic code for what we need to do in today’s post in this Blogtorial Series is relatively simple. The code will use the state of the Multi-Value parameter Intermediate_Rail_Count count to suppress … Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Update 2 for Inventor 2013 Service Pack 1.1

            Seems kind of funny all of the updates to incremental service pack releases, but it is what it is. Here are the things that are remedied by this update: iLogic Design Copy not working after … Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Automated Cabinetmaking Design Tutorial – Extruding The Face Frame 02

 Automated Cabinetmaking – Face Frame Extrusion In the last installment of this Automated Cabinetmaking series of tutorials, we extruded the face frame rails. Today we will finish up the face frame extrusions by extruding the stiles, and mess around with … Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Automated Cabinetmaking Design Tutorial – Extruding The Face Frame

Automated Cabinetmaking Design Tutorial  It’s been a hell of a long time since my last post in this Automated Cabinetmaking Design series, but I’m back at it –albeit with a little modification to how I post. The old posts in … Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Help Support Layout Modeling!

Anyone who has done the tutorials on this website knows how powerful multi-solid body “Layout Modeling” work-flows are. Originally known as skeletal modeling, this updated work-flow was renamed "Layout Design" modeling when the new multi-solid body schema was introduced by Autodesk back in 2010. From there, Autodesk promptly dropped the ball and abandoned what is easily the most powerful part of the program to focus on bells and whistles for the low information crowd. Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Designing the Perfect Cabinetmaking Program

I have my own idea as to how to begin a job with the new Cabinetmaking Program, but would like to hear from others what they feel. What do you like about other software? What do you hate? What would be the perfect way to go about starting a custom cabinetmaking job? I’ve started a forum on the subject at the link below, please stop in and comment! Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Autodesk Inventor 2013 Service Pack 1.1 is Available for Download

The Autodesk Inventor 2013 Service Pack 1.1 is available for download. There is also a link to a Hotfix for Vault that “cures” the problem whereby Inventor “unexpectedly exits (crashes) when checking in files” Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Inventor 2013 Update 2 Available for Download

Hopefully Inventor 2013 Update 2 will solve some of the glitches in this release. I was expecting Service Pack 1 for Inventor 2013 to be out by now, but these “updates” must be the new ‘thing’ over at Autodesk. I … Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Automated Sheet Metal Structure Design with Autodesk Inventor

What I came up with is somewhat like a square shutter mechanism where four segmented quadrants slide past one another and add or subtract segments based on min/max specs. The whole schlemiel is controlled by a series of formulae and iLogic code that assure that the design is always per company standard and error free. Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Inventor 2013 New Feature – Create a Three-Point-Center Rectangle

As with the Two-Point-Center Rectangle new feature for Inventor 2013, this feature has actually been around for some time as an add-in created by Brian Hall. I really don’t see the utility in this version as I believe you can do everything that this tool can do with the Two-Point-Center Rectangle tool –and do so in one less step. If someone has a workflow for this tool that cannot be accomplished with the Two-Pointer, please respond in the comments below. Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Inventor 2013 Update 1 Available for Download

When I installed the update this morning, something very unusual happened. Last night I created a video of a very detailed iLogic super model being run through all of its configurations. The model ran as fast as I’ve ever seen iLogic run for a model its size, but this morning, after the update was installed, every single configuration now runs a minimum of twice as fast, but mostly four of five times as fast!!! Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

ERP Cabinetmaking Design Tutorial – iLogic Code for the Face Frame

We left off the last installment of this ERP Cabinetmaking Design Tutorial with the completion of the Rail Options. In this segment we will create a multi-value text parameter that will control how many of the intermediate rails are present. We then need to link the text value to a numerical value that is based on the current height and the amount intermediate rails desired. To start, we’ll create the multi-value text parameter. Open the Parameter Editor and create a new Text parameter named Intermediate_Rail_Count… Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Inventor 2013 New Feature – Create a Two-Point-Center Rectangle

This new feature for Inventor 2013 has actually been around for a couple years as a free add-in created by QubeIt. The built-in one that is now available in Inventor is nice in that it has all of the rectangle commands in one drop-down list instead of the extra add-in one but, unfortunately, they only included two of the four tools that were in Brian’s add-in… Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

ERP Cabinetmaking Tutorial – Continuing the Face Frame Option Sketch

The reason for the separate sketches is pretty simple, if you start piling optional geometry atop of your base feature’s geometry, pretty soon you have a pile of unmanageable gobbledygook that is sure to explode the first time it is configured via iLogic. It’s not pretty, trust me. Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Inventor 2013 New Feature – Set Sketch Scale by the First Dimension

Sure, you can get around this by tediously watching the gizmos in the old schema, but a far better choice is let the design juices flow, then sort out the minutia later, which is what this Inventor 2013 New Feature allows. The same sketch is shown below in Inventor 2013 with the same dimension added… Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

ERP Ready Cabinet Design Tutorial – The Face Frame Options

Best guess is that we will only need three intermediate rails, so that’s what we will create. We also need to represent the top and bottom rail in this sketch here to keep things bulletproof. What I mean by that is that if we were to use the top and bottom rail profiles in the Side Elevation sketch to create our features, then some idiot (me) drives the width to a dimension larger than the face frame itself, the line that represents the top or bottom rail goes beyond the frame geometry that it used to be part of. The example below shows a bottom rail that is sketched the same way as our Side Elevation sketch… Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

ERP Cabinet Design – Inventor 2013 Squirrely Graphics Update

As of yet there is no word on what causes Inventor 2013’s graphics to go squirrely, but my best guess is that it has to do with sketch geometry being driven by an iLogic rule. At any rate, I’ve decided … Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Inventor 2013 New Feature – Origin Plane Display

            This new feature for Inventor 2013 takes a bit of getting used to, but when it all boils down, it’s a nice addition to the program. In the old days, when you clicked on … Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

Inventor 2013 New Feature – User Preferences

This new Inventor 2013 feature is new in the same sense as buying a used car. It is new to you --but has been around the block. What they have done is removed some of the preference that used to be only available while you were installing Inventor, and placed them in various places within the program. This not only benefits you with the access to these settings at all times, but also makes for a much smoother install. I can say from my recent (two days ago) experience installing Autodesk Product Design Suite 2013, that it installed flawlessly -without a single nag screen –a vast improvement over previous versions where Inventor alone was a nightmare to install (Product Design Suite 2013 has a huge amount of included programs, and all of them installed effortlessly and attended from a flash drive). Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.

ERP Ready Cabinet Design Tutorial – Explaining iLogic Code

The ERP system I worked with using Inventor 2011 and 2012 was still in beta, so I’ll look into where they are at, and hopefully add some tie-ins to their system. At any rate, whether or not we tie this model into an ERP system immediately, we should be able to do so at a later date without too much modification. We’ll begin today with a video… Continue reading →

The Open Design Project - This site is the home of the Autodesk Inventor Blogtorial series tutorials.