-
In The Machine is the official blog of the Inventor Product Management Team. It is a way for us to share Inventor news, interesting information about successful Inventor customers and partners as well as tips and tricks. From time to time we’ll also use the blog to solicit feedback from users via surveys. This blog is hosted by Garin Gardiner our Technical Marketing Manager.
-
Several uses for the ctrl key
November 29, 2005 11:44 AMbyMany of you are probably already aware that while sketching a line in Inventor, you can hold down the ctrl key to turn off the creation of constraints such as horizontal, vertical, perpendicular and tangent. This is a great little trick when you are in a complex sketch and don't want constraints to be added to particular line segments.
What some of you might not know is that you can also use the same technique when placing dimensions to turn on or off the edit dimension dialog box on placement. I always turn on the "Edit dimensions when created"? option in Inventor although there are times that I want to add several dimensions quickly and don't necessarily want the Edit Dimension dialog to keep popping up. If you hold down the ctrl key when placing a dimension it will disable the edit box until you let up on the ctrl key.
You can also use the same technique when projecting edges from one part to another. The default in Inventor is to make cross part projections adaptive although there are times when you may want to project edges and turn off the adaptivity. When projecting edges from one part to another, you can simply hold down the ctrl key to toggle adaptivety on/off depending on your setting in the assembly tab under application options.
Garin Gardiner
-
Inventor Community in Italy
November 27, 2005 12:16 AMbyBefore I leave for AU tomorrow I wanted to post my pictures from my visit to Italy earlier this month. It was my first time attending the annual Italian Inventor user group meeting in Modena. It is quite the impressive meeting with over 770 Inventor users all getting together for the day to hear about new trends, share customer success and learn from tips and tricks sessions. Customers come from all over Italy and the several of the Italian resellers have a competition to see who can bring more customers - they even rent buses to make it easy for people to attend.
I gave a short presentation on things we do to gather customer data and how that data factors into our future plans. Then the highlight of the day was an interview with Charlie Bliss - they flew him over to talk about his experiences building cbliss.com and interacting the Inventor community. It was great -- one group even had a banner!! All afternoon people were asking for Charlie's autograph - it was so much fun!!
On Wed evening back in Milan I had a short time to sight see. Unfortunately the main attraction- the Duomo was covered by a scaffolding... but as luck would have it the scaffolding was designed with Inventor. This customer was one of the 4 who presented during the user group meeting. Such a coincidence!
I've packed my camera and will post throughout the week from AU. I'm sure Shaan Hurley will have a ton more pictures so if please check out his site as well.
-Amy
-
Colorado Inventor Users Blog
November 21, 2005 05:29 PMbyI just learned of a new Blog set up by Eric France from Avatech (one of our resellers) in Colorado. His stated purpose is to provide a mechanism for users in Colorado and nearby states to interact and stay current on Inventor happenings. For those of you in the Denver area, there next user group meeting in Nov 16 at the Denver Tech Center.
-Amy
-
Surfing on a Cruise Ship?
November 17, 2005 11:20 PMbyWaveLoch uses Inventor to design fabricated wave rides. One of their rides will be the main attraction featured on Royal Caribbean's newest cruise ship. The Freedom of the Seas will be the largest cruise ship ever built and is due to launch in May 2006. For those of you in the US look for the Royal Caribbean TV commercial featuring surfing on board and check out the link to Royal Caribbean for a cool rendering.
-Amy
0 Comment | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Autodesk Inventor
-
Setting up Conditional Suppression
November 9, 2005 09:55 AMbyThere are a few new features in R10 that many Inventor users haven't discovered yet. One of which is the ability to conditionally suppress features based on the size of other features. One example where this could be used is if you created a plate that had a slot in the middle that you might want to suppress if the plate gets below a certain size. To do this you will want to know what dimension drives the width of the plate. Right click on the feature in the browser that makes the slot and select Properties. You will now notice that you can set up a conditional suppression so that if the width dimension gets below a certain value it will suppress the feature that makes up the slot. This can be very useful to add more intelligence into your Inventor models.
-Garin
-
New Case Study: Microlights Ltd
November 2, 2005 03:14 PMbyMicrolights Limited (www.microlightsgroup.com) selected Inventor 4 years ago and it has now become an integral part of their product design processes. They rely heavily on the 3d visualization capabilities and also report that Inventor's 2D drawing capability is a great time saver. We can produce drawings to send to our suppliers, complete with any number of views and sections, directly from Inventor in a matter of minutes." Daniel [King, Engineering Manager] estimates, "Before we had Inventor that would have taken at least a week."
Read the entire story by downloading Microlights.pdf .
-Amy
-
Survey on mixed AutoCAD / Inventor Environments
November 1, 2005 05:25 PMbyThe Inventor team is doing some research on interoperability between AutoCAD and Inventor. We've put together a survey that asks some questions regarding what type of work you do in Inventor and when/why you might create DWGs.
If you'd like to provide your input please visit the survey here.
Thanks in advance. - Amy
0 Comment | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Autodesk Inventor
-
New AutoCAD Blog
November 1, 2005 05:20 PMbyHeidi Hewett, a technical marketing manager for AutoCAD, has created a new blog called the AutoCAD insider - since her job is really focused on helping people learn and understand AutoCAD there should be lots of good technical tips here. Rather than repeat her bio and explain what she is up to you can just read about it here.