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.
Not a user of the electrical product on a daily basis, I find myself when working in a project opening up the wrong files often. This could be do to poor naming procedures, but I normally rename my files towards the end of a project. Thank you Autodesk for having the Quick View Drawings functionality, what a time saver. Lets take a look.
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Video Link:
http://www.screencast.com/t/ZGZlZDg4YzMt
Created by one of the Cad Geeks
Today I will talk quickly about Drawing Index pages using AutoCAD Electrical.
This can be an easily overlooked topic in AutoCAD Electrical considering most people would think it would be a report that they would run, and they don't find it there. Don't worry, it can be done. Have the project you would like to run it on active and the drawing opened that you would like the index placed on. You will then right click on the project file and click on "Drawing List Report". Follow the steps below and adjust where needed to fit your specific needs.
Digging a little deeper into those folders I traditionally over look that come with your Inventor media. I was surprised with a ton of great functionality. The latest one I have been playing with are those listed under drawing tools. C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Inventor 2009\SDK\UserTools\DrawingTools. Here I found 3 handy items: Chain Dimension which can relieve you of some tedious work, Alpha Sort for automatically putting your drawings into alphabetical order and revision cloud a lot of people like the idea of using the revision clouds with Design Review I can add revision clouds right from Inventor I just don’t have the selection like I do with Design Review. With this it will create a sketch under the view that I will be applying it to. I thought it would be really cool if I could use crop view with it but unfortunately you can’t.
Check it out
http://screencast.com/t/9Ya8JlOzFl
Submitted by Dave of the INCAT CAD Geeks
I've come across this dilemma quite a few times at INCAT.... A customer is migrating from 2D AutoCAD to Inventor (finally) and the question comes up to if they will re-model some of their existing AutoCAD data into Inventor. More often than I like to hear, the answer is NO, we can't verify that our AutoCAD data is accurate. Over-ridden dimensions are mostly to blame for this answer. It seems it is much easier to edit a dimension to the length that you want it to be rather than go through all of the hassles of updating all of that non-associative geometry (I smell trouble). My Dad always used to tell me "If you can't find the time to do it right now, how are you going to find time to FIX it later?"
Inventor to the rescue! Although it won't compensate for the fudge factor your colleagues choose to use in AutoCAD, Inventor WILL adjust imported dimensions to the correct dimension that the geometry is drawn to.
Check this video out of some changed dimensions in AutoCAD and how Inventor "repairs" them to what the geometry reflects....
http://screencast.com/t/SqQYAt4t
Hope that helps,
John with the INCAT CAD geeks
Check out my video of how to do this.
http://www.screencast.com/t/lJ0Gjs2M
Enjoy,
Jim
Another one of the INCAT CAD Geeks
I was recently asked how to dimension to Apparent Intersection within an Inventor IDW.
I thought I would post since I do recall learning this for the first time and it was one of those commands that isn't very discoverable. :(
Link to Video to see how
Hope this helps
Kevin with the INCAT CAD Geeks
