Tag Archives: Productivity

How-To Create Templates in Autodesk Inventor

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How to create template files in Autodesk InventorTemplates are a very productive way of reusing modified Inventor files. For example, LENGTH, WIDTH, and THICKNESS iPropertes for woodworkers that normally create cutlists. Or you can have a company standards FX part pre-inserted (something I do). If you only work with a certain material, your template file can have that material already applied. You get the gist.

 You can literally have hundreds of modified part, assembly, drawing, presentation, and weldment files that are preconfigured for a certain client, a certain work-flow, or what have you. As I told a reader In the comments yesterday, I keep folders of template files for specific companies that I subcontract for in an archive, and when I again do business with them, I drop their folder into the Inventor Templates folder and voila!

 

Creating new template tabs in Autodesk Inventor

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Autodesk Inventor Tip – Zooming Around Inside Solid Bodies

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The following post is an Autodesk Inventor Tip that shows you how to zoom around inside of your Autodesk Inventor 3D models. I use the technique quite a bit when creating multi-solid bodied layout parts to visually check for interference.

For those of you looking for the next post in the Shaker Table series of Autodesk Inventor tutorials –I will be getting back to it in the soon (next post or four). I will be adding an iLogic feature that automatically chooses and swaps out some hardware based on design parameters. Should be good-to-go in one to nine days –give or take……………….. ;)

Back to the subject at hand. I have always used this technique –zooming inside of models, and assumed everyone else did as well, until a coworker gave it a try –—–and couldn’t do it!

In fact, none of the people I worked with at the time could get it to work! When they tried to zoom into their models, the program would bog down and not let them do so.

For example, this is what I would see if I zoomed into the corner of the Shaker Table tutorial model…

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What I Did Last Summer (Fall, Winter, and Spring)

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Well…….. It’s been an incredibly long time since my last post. Over a year if you disregard the lame one about using Fractions in Parameters posted way back in in January. The reason for this huge posting lapse Is that I have been working on a contract job in Washington State…

…and since June, I’ve been building the little BIM Eco House half days and on weekends in addition to the contract work. A very busy summer!

But now, the contract with the Washington company has wrapped up and I am fairly well caught up on the house build leaving me with enough time to write at least a couple articles a week from here on in. I plan to link these efforts here at the ODP with my Autodesk Inventor for Woodworkers LinkedIn Group (feel free to join) as I haven’t done squat there either (I started the group just before I left for Washington last year).

Near-term Website Focus

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Autodesk Inventor Brings Out Dynamic Structures’ Wild Side

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Roller Coaster

I found this article from Design News interesting because Dynamic Structures design spiral sounds very similar to the one used in the yacht building industry.

The following quote brought back some memories of yacht design where we used Inventor, AutoCAD, Navisworks (before Autodesk bought them), Rhino, ShipConstructor, and 3Ds Max for rendering and animations…

“Often we create a track in AutoCAD and use Inventor to design a vehicle,” continues Breckenridge. “Then we can put them together in 3D Studio (3ds) and produce an animation that shows what a ride will look like. We use Navisworks for visualization and dynamic simulation. Then we can play the video animation for clients so they can see what the vehicle looks like as seen from a spot on the ground. Or, we can show them what the ride looks like from the front seat.”

 

I don’t think the AutoCAD/Inventor workflow is efficient or accurate , but unfortunately, it is often necessary for many reasons.  The second part, about the visuals is spot-on. Clients now expect to see their project designed in 3D, and more and more they are demanding fly-throughs  and animations in addition to renderings.

 

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Autodesk recently came out with the ‘Factory Design Suite’ suite of programs that give factory designers a full toolset at a better price, but a more generic toolset that goes from sketch to animations would likely have more mass appeal.  Just sayin’.

Read the rest of the article at Design News >>>

 





Inventor iLogic Text Manipulation Rule

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Introducing a new iLogic Text Manipulation Rule that eliminates the need for multiple text features in many Inventor Models!

This exciting new iLogic Rule accesses the text object directly (not normally possible), therefore requiring the modeling of just a single Text feature for the description of what can be a boat-load of, say, embossed part number features (or similar identifiers).

The head markings on the FastenMaster BIM components shown to the right are a good example of where this new rule would come in very handy.  If you go over to the FastenMaster BIM page and scroll down to the OlyLog Log Fastener, you will see that there are 9 different versions of this fastener –each version  required a Sketch, Text, and an Emboss feature to describe it’s head marking (download one and check it yourself). With this new rule, the same result could be accomplished with one feature-set and a rule with multiple lines of text as options.

The time savings in feature creation would range from a few minutes to hours, but the added benefit of dramatically lowered computing overhead (depending on the amount of suppressions manipulated) will last the life of the Smart Part. Maybe a zillion hours total. I’ll be posting the rule along with a brief tutorial over the weekend. Also this weekend, the latest, greatest, version of the iCabinet with full material generation capabilities will be posted along with a short video. Later…

 

 

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No Color for CAD Drawings Needed…… When Printing For Dogs

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CADghettiI received a Google Alert for the keyword BIM this AM that lead to a press release about a construction firm in Neenah, WI (a town just down the road from me). It was hard to figure who the release was aimed at, as it was a boilerplate ‘we use BIM, and are damn excited about it!” type of release, but with a bit of digging it became more interesting.

I clicked on the link to the construction firm in question, Miron Construction, which has a better than average corporate page in that it had quite a few links to articles. Hiding between some greenwashing, was a link to an article by Peter Lawrence titled “Changing the Color Paradigm: Expanding the role of color in construction documentation”. My attention was piqued. The subject is near and dear to me because I have experience on both sides of construction drawings.

In the article, Peter gives an example of a workshop he performs. He gives a group a couple D-size drawings, one monochrome, and the other color. Starting with the monochrome drawing, he asks them to count the number of sinks in the drawing, and the group responds with 7, 8, or 9 sinks. He then asks them to count the sinks on the color drawing, where they all get the correct answer, 10. He doesn’t mention this, but I’ll bet it took less than half the time to get the rightanswer with the color drawing. In my experience, even the best people we had at one company made numerous mistakes on our black and white drawings. It is no wonder why, they looked like black spaghetti served up on king-sized toilet paper. It actually hurt your eyes trying to decipher the mess. Continue reading →