Tag Archives: Autodesk

Posts related to Autodesk Software

Creating a New Application Color Scheme in Autodesk Inventor

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New Inventor Color SchemeFor those of you who have created your own background image for Inventor and need a color scheme to match –or if you just want to fine tune things to fit your style, there is a way to do so.

The stock color schemes that ship with Inventor are, in my opinion, just fine for most people for the majority of uses. But, with a white background such as the one used for the ‘Presentation’ color scheme,  there is a problem with a couple items that use yellow as their color such as the work axes  shown below (click)…

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Creating a Routed System with Vanilla Autodesk Inventor – Phase Next

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If you didn’t sleep through the previous post, you were promised some stuff at the very end. This is that stuff. It took longer than it should have as I had to get some drawings to the plumber. Without further ado…

The next part needed in this assembly is another 4” ‘Long Sweep’ elbow that goes somewhere below the circle that represents the closet flange penetration. To place this part, I needed to align the axis of one of its legs to an axis running through the center of the circle parallel to the Z Origin Axis. That axis does not exist, so I needed to create it.

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A quick note about structure before I continue. All of the layout sketches and work features being created are located within the Plumbing Layout.ipt part file which is located within the Plumbing_08-25-10.iam. All of the plumbing parts are located in the same assembly as can be seen in the image of the Browser Bar to the above (click).

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Creating a Routed System with Vanilla Autodesk Inventor

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For this series of articles, the Routed System of choice will be your average everyday home plumbing. The DWV (drain, waste, and vent) system to be exact.  

The DWV layout I am using as an example is for is for a little eco cottage design that has all of the mechanicals running through chases and partition walls to keep the thermal envelope as intact as possible — but the technique will work on any design equally well. Also of note is that the design has a FPSF (frost Protected Shallow Foundation) slab……which means there is only one chance to get things right.

The Penetrations

The penetration drawing is a plan view sketch that shows where the various pipes pass through the structure at whatever level is represented. It is created  as the first sketch in a part file located in the overall plumbing assembly. This is a hold-over from ship design days, but it works on houses as well.  

For this particular house, you can see that the stack and vents run up a 2” x 6” partition wall. There is a wet vent at the other end of the wall as well, but is not shown. All of these penetrations run down the center of the wall, and can be drawn on the same plane, which is where I started.

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Autodesk Inventor vs………..a Crayon

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The crayon in question is Crayon Physics Deluxe, —– a cool little program written back in 07 by Petri Purho, that uses artificial physics and virtual crayons to complete levels of an interesting  little game.

I downloaded the original version of the game (pre deluxe) for my four year old daughter back-in-the-day thinking it would be a fun learning tool….but it didn’t take.  I guess four year olds are less interested in physics than I thought……..even if it did involve crayons. Whodathunk?

Maybe it had something to do with the old-school Pink Floydesque soundtrack. One can never be sure….

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Pella ThermaStar New Construction Window BIM Objects – Good to Go!

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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…

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Is There a Downside To Autodesk Subscription Advantage Packs?

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For those of you not familiar, Autodesk has a program whereby those customers on subscription can download and install what amount to bits of future program functionality. This is all good  …….until you cancel your subscription. From there on in the Subscription Advantage becomes a disadvantage, and keeping your Inventor software running optimally will be problematic at best (see my article on who is the biggest Service Pack ass —Autodesk or Dassault ).

When the article linked above was written (May), Autodesk was storing the updates for Inventor with the Subscription Advantage Pack installed behind the subscription firewall —which meant that if your subscription lapsed, you could not apply any new service packs without abandoning the Subscription Advantage Pack.

In my case, Inventor’s Service Pack 1 came out before the economy forced me to shed my subscription, so I had that one installed —— but I could not apply the next two (as of this writing it is at SP3, and they sometimes go to SP4) without access to the special service packs behind the subscription firewall.

So, I resigned myself to the fact that I could not apply service packs beyond #1.  Installing the regular packs  would kill my iLogic installation, and that cannot happen.  Not that big of a deal, and I had long ago resigned to living with what I have……………. until last night.

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The Program Goes Down The Toilet

I generally push the program to the limits, and as such, get a fair amount of crashes……but last night was exceptional.  I had five in a row as I tried to use the “Make Components” command on a Layout part. I kept trying different things to see if I could narrow down what was causing the crash, and the program just kept on crashing. There was nothing really remarkable about the chain of events, except, that a toilet flashed onscreen just before the program disappeared each and every time.

The toilet in question is one that I modeled awhile back (a Kohler 3555), and it was  present in an assembly file located within the master assembly —-which  was open on a different tab.  But it was not opened by itself or in context of its parent assembly for at least a month. It was very strange (and pretty damn funny) that a toilet would flash onscreen just before the program went down the tubes.

This entire event took all of two minutes, and was of little importance beyond a good toilet story. It’s what happen next that that sparked my interest.

After each of the crashes, a CER (Customer Error Report) form popped up, and was dutifully sent to Autodesk to analyze. After 15 minutes or so, my inbox had five emails from Autodesk which amount to form letters telling me that there are service packs available that may or may not fix whatever problem I may or may not be having. Continue reading →