The Dan Miles Idea Factory

Autodesk University 2008 - Inventor Large Assembly Class

Attached is this post is the handout and PowerPoint from my "Autodesk Inventor Best Practices for Working with Large Assemblies" class from Autodesk University 2008.  This document contains all of the latest and greatest items for release 2009.  The class was on Tuesday afternoon and was attended by about 250 people with several people sticking around for additional questions at the end which was nice.  Overall I think the class went over very well and a ton of content was covered in 90 minutes.  Autodesk also was streaming this class LIVE over the web and I believe it was recorded for future viewing hopefully at the link below:

Live from AU 2008

I will post a video version and the class in the coming weeks also.  If you attended the class live or over the web thank you.  Also please feel free to let me know your thoughts on the content.

Download ML111-1P_Dan Miles  - Class Handout

Download AU 2008 - ML111-1P - Dan Miles - Large Assembly Best Practices  - Class Presentation

Thanks

Dan Miles

Level of Detail Methodology

Over the past few months I have seen and hear about some great success adopting the "Master - Medium - Low" methodlogy for using Level of Detail (LOD's) within Autodesk Inventor for large assemblies.  I still believe this is a very good workflow because it allows you to adopt a standard method within your company that everyone can use successfully.  The quick overview is listed below:  You can get more detail within my Autodesk University class at the link below.

Working with Large Assemblies - Autodesk University 2007

You create and use three different LOD's

Master = The “Master” LOD is a default configuration created by Inventor that enables all components within the assembly to be loaded. This ensures the most complete model is loaded, but also consumes the most memory.

Medium = The “Medium” LOD is a custom configuration created by the user and contains less components and detail than the overall “Master” LOD. The goal with this LOD is to offload all of the items not required for daily work like fasteners, internal components, and components not in the general work area.

Low = The “Low” LOD is also a custom configuration created by the user for each assembly, and contains the least amount of components and detail possible. The purpose of this LOD is to provide the most basic components and detail, which contains less components than the “Medium” LOD. This LOD will offer the most performance increases and requires the least amount of memory.

The real benefit is when you start to nest them together like the diagram below.

If you are working with large assemblies give this a try.

Dan

Improving Inventor Content Center Performance

Most people find that using the out of box content center libraries within Autodesk Inventor are often slow.  The standard libraries contain hundreds of thousands of items in them making them very large.  Often most of the items in the libraries will never be used by you.  There are some crazy items in there that maybe only a few people would use.  The best way to improve performance and usability of the content center libraries is to create your own library.  You would first create your own library within the ADMS Console and then copy the items you use from the standard libraries into your new custom library.  Then you would change your Autodesk Inventor project file to connect just to your new ones.  This will greatly simplify the content center and increase performance for your company.

Hope this helps you out

Dan

Inventor Drawing Template Sequence

When you create your own custom Inventor drawings templates either in IDW or DWG format make sure you first start with modifing the styles as needed before creating geometry.  I always make all of my adjustments to the text, dimensions, layers, and etc within the styles and standards first.  This way when I start to create geometry and text like titleblocks everything is placed on the correct standard.

Dan

Better Fillets in Autodesk Inventor - Smooth

There are two different styles of fillets available within Autodesk Inventor.  Within the standard fillet dialog you can select either a G1 or G2 fillet type.  The default is the standard G1 and the G2 option became available a few releases ago.

The standard G1 fillets are tangent to the adjacent faces.  As you can see in the image below the fillet face starts right at the edge of the other faces.

The standard G2 advanced fillets are curvature continuous to the adjacent faces.  These types of fillets cause changes in curvature to occur gradually, resulting in a much smoother and more aesthetically pleasing transition between faces.  As you can see in the image below the fillet gradually occurs.

If you create consumer products give this a try to improve your product.

Dan

Setting Up Your Inventor Common Folders

If you are using Autodesk Inventor within a group of people there are a few things you should setup to ensure eveyone is using Inventor the same way.  For about 90% of the companies I setup the following folder structure is used to share common items Inventor requires.  I would recommend putting this on a network somewhere.

The "Design Data" folder is used for storing your style libraries and other files like the thread.xls for example.  You will need to change your application options or project file to point to this new location.

The "Templates" folder is used to store all of your startup file templates.  You will need to change your application options or project file to point to this new location.

The "Catalog" folder is used to store all of your iFeatures.  I would recommend coping the out of box catalog folder to this new location as a starting point.  You will need to change your application options to use this new catalog location also.

The "Preferences" folder is something new I started doing in Autodesk Inventor 2008.  Inventor 2008 allow you to export and import your application options settings in the form of an XML preferences file.  I generally make a common starting point file that is used to deploy new clients and etc.  You would copy all of these XML files here are you export them from Autodesk Inventor.

For more information on this topic please referance my "Implementing Inventor White Paper" in this  blog post.

Implementing Autodesk Inventor White Paper

Have a good one

Dan

Return to Top Within Inventor

Here is a simple but useful tip that some people may not know about because it is hidden a little.  There are two types of "Return" operations for exiting a component edit within your assembly model.  The two different types are "Top" and "Parent".

The default method is "Parent" which takes you back one level within your assembly structure.  The "Top" option will return you back to the top level of the active assembly document.  Sometimes this can save you a few clicks.

One kinda important note is the last selected return type because your default when hitting the normal "Return" button.

Dan

Model Parameters in File iProperties

Garin from Autodesk posted a nice Podcast today to his blog site for how to use model parameters in file iProperties.  This is create for stock lists for weldments and lengths of tubes and pipes for example.

Adding Parameters into iProperties - Garin Gardiner

Dan

Temporary Turning off Auto Sketch Constraining

About 90 plus percent of the time you want to have Autodesk Inventor provide auto sketch geometry constraints while sketching.  There is an application option under the sketch tab that allows you to turn the auto constraining off but often it is not worth messing with because you only want it off for a second.  You can temporary turn off the auto constraining by holding down the “CTRL” key on your keyboard while sketching.

Default Auto Contraining

What Happens while holding down "CTRL"

Dan

Quick Inventor Model Render - Just 4 Steps

Have you ever used the built in Inventor Studio within Autodesk Inventor?  If the answer is Yes this post may be to simple for you but if the answer is no this post is for you.  I often talk to people that have never used Inventor Studio for rendering models because they think it is to much work.  Outlined below is a simple couple step process to create a very quick but very nice rendering of your Inventor model.  These images will sure impress the boss and peers so don't tell everyone how easy it is. :-)

Step 1 = Activate the "Inventor Studio" environment within Autodesk Inventor from the applications pull down menu.

Step 2 = Set your lighting style to "Global Lighting" within the "Light Styles" dialog.  The global lighting is built into Inventor 2008.

Step 3 = Set your background color or scene style within the "Scene Styles" dialog.  Use your application option setting or set the colors to white for most of the cases.

Step 4 = Render a image and share it around the office using the "Render Image" tool.

Example Export of Simple Parts

Give it a try!

Dan