Ellipsis

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  Ellipsis is the official blog of Autodesk's Technical Evangelist Team. We will discuss all things design and manufacturing related with a focus on industries such as automotive and transportation, consumer products, industrial machinery and building product manufacturing and fabrication. We also have resident experts who will blog about specific product developments in CAD, Simulation, Industrial Design and Data Management.

  We look forward to providing you, our user community, with the most relevant and up to date developments in our industry, and hopefully with information that will assist you in doing your job better, faster, and more precisely.

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  Lights... Camera...
  January 23, 2009 04:08 PMby Jay Tedeschi

  Hmmm… I have a sneaking suspicion that I have named an entry this before, but a quick search of my archives came up with nothing so I will stick with it. In any case, this one is a quick tip that should help out all of you who use Inventor Studio for creating product imagery.

  The stock lighting styles that ship with Inventor assume a model of X cubic area or volume. You will more likely than not find that when applying a style to a model that is either significantly smaller or larger than the that default volume that the lights simply do not look “right”, either drowning out your model or highlighting a very small patch of it. Well, before you start moving the light origins there is a quick global change that you can make that may be just what you need.

  

  As you can see from this image, the model is a bit larger than the effectively lighted area defined by the default settings in this lighting style. As I already pointed out, this can be corrected without touching the position of either of these lights by simply adjusting the global scale.

  

  Upon opening the Lighting Styles dialog the last tab, named Position, has a Scale slider. Not surprisingly, by default it is set to 100%.

  

  If this setting is changed, as it is here to 300%, then the position of all of the lighting elements in the scene is changed and the result is more in line with what I wanted.

  

  Much better…
  Well, that is it for now, hope this helps.

  1 Comment | Add CommentIn Ellipsis > Tips, All, Inventor 2008, Inventor 2009

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  Bears do it...
  January 5, 2009 10:56 AMby Jay Tedeschi

  Bears do it... but you may not need to. Hibernate that is. 

  If you are using Microsoft Vista, there is a hidden culprit consuming what is more likely than not a good portion of your hard drive.  I knew this, but somehow when I set to the task of building a virtual machine recently to test the newest version of Inventor I neglected to take it into account.  Imagine my surprise upon finishing the Vista\Office install and service pack upgrades to find that the free space on my once seemingly huge 30Gb virtual drive reduced to a paltry 7Gb.

  A quick look at what was consuming so much space on my drive brought it all back.  Depending on your hardware "landscape" you may find that you never use the hibernate feature of your Microsoft OS, in which case it is, at least for most of us, desireable to recover that unused disk space.  Vista unfortunately throws us a curve as hibernation is not a feature which can be disabled from the GUI.  There is a way to do this however via the command prompt, but keep in mind that changes like this require admin privaledges, so you have to run the command prompt "as administrator".

  

  So, go to Start\All Programs\Accessories\Command Prompt and right click to access the "Run as administrator" option.  Once this is done the familiar DOS command prompt window will appear and you simply enter the string "powercfg -h off" which will disable the hibernation feature and get rid of that pesky hiberfil.sys file.

  

  I hope you find this helpful and I hope that you are all looking forward to all the great stuff we have in store for you this new year!

  5 Comments | Add CommentIn Ellipsis > All, Tips