Parts, assemblies, or sub-assemblies can be used as reference in our models. This means their Bill of Materials structure is set to reference. Reference models are commonly items that we are designing around, and don't want to show up on our manufacturing BOM. These could be supplied by outside sources or modeled up ourselves. These models show up by default as reference lines in an Inventor drawing view. Did you know there are also a number of other options available to control those reference models in the drawing view. Perhaps you want to show them as solid lines, or they keep getting cut off in the drawing view, maybe you don't want to show them at all. It seems like I have been getting a lot of questions about this lately so I thought I would share a deeper look into the referenced model as used in an Inventor drawing.
Utilizing the Content Center data that comes with Autodesk Inventor is a great way to save time modeling standard components. The thing is, there is a difference between having a large library of standard parts and a large library of Useful standard parts. The Content Center comes with so much that often times Inventor users are overwhelmed and can not find the standard parts they are looking for. Content Center Favorites is a great way to build your own selection of Content Center data. This also works great with Content Center Filters which we covered last week.
The ability to blend fillets and similar feature has been increasing over the years, but Autodesk has really outdone itself with the automatic blending that occurs when using the "move face" command. Moving a feature with fillets to an area on the part that also contains fillets will cause a blended region to occur automatically. Whats more, you can even see this occur in the real time preview so you know exactly what you are going to get as a result.
What does your Content Center look like? Many Inventor Content Centers I see will look different based on how many CC Libraries are installed, or have been created custom. All those Content Center libraries can be a lot to sort through when building a set of Favorites or when searching for a certain part. Content Center Filters are a great way to filter based on standard or user created libraries and categories. Do this before creating a list of Content Center favorites and you can save your self a lot of time. The two Content Center features work great hand in hand. Today we'll look at Filters. Next week we'll visit Favorites.
In todays day and age we are all very busy, and it seems we dont have much extra time. I have put together a video that will take you through a high level look at Autodesk Inventor 2011 What's New in under 30 minutes. Of course this is not everything but should be enough to spark your interest to learn more. A few short slides and some clicks and picks, will have you wanting more information.
Let's take a look!!!
http://my.brainshark.com/Inventor-2011-30-Minutes-or-Less-450754882
Created by Dave one of the Cad Geeks
This feature was new to Inventor 2010 and with the next release on the way, I wanted to get this one in our blog. User Coordinate Systems in Inventor. I have found many interesting ways to implement this for customers over the year. In a single part you can use this to locate a new 0X,0Y,0Z, or just locate a specific connection point. Then in the assembly this works great for constraining parts together based on that known point instead of using three or more assembly constraints. This can be done easily using the Constraint Set constraint in the assembly environment. It allows you to quickly put components together based on mating UCS axis, and planes in a few clicks.
I'm not about to take credit for revealing some kind of new paradigm in modeling technique... that has already been taken care of by other fellow bloggers. But I am wondering how long it will take for the average user to realize that they can move many of the Inventor dialog boxes right off their screen. Want more screen space? I thought so... this is an Inventor release for you. I will just show a couple simple examples with the Inventor revolve, extrude, and fillet commands, and then you can check out Rob Cohee's blog for a more in depth demonstration. He also has an example of creating the same typle of part with Inventor 2010 so you can really get an idea of the differences.
Extrude Command example video HERE.
Check out Rob's more in depth comparison HERE.
Contributed by Ben of the Tata Technologies CAD Geeks
Free Move
Video link:
http://www.screencast.com/t/YjgzMjk1MD
Created by one of the Cad Geeks
