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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.
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2D Web Based Sketching (Free!!)
October 29, 2007 10:21 PMby Garin Gardiner
The Labs team is at it again with their newest addition Project Draw. This is a free web based sketcher that allows you to create simple floor plans, electronic-circuit diagrams, network diagrams, user interface mock-ups, and more. I didnt think I would have much use for this until I spend about 10 minutes with Project Draw. I quickly realized my paint program will have a little less use in the future. It is very easy to use and for certain applications will make creating sketches and drawings very simple. You never know, I might even get my wife to retire Microsoft Paint and start using an Autodesk product!
Take a look at it on Labs.
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/draw/
Enjoy!
Garin
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Off To the Windy City
October 26, 2007 05:58 AMby Garin Gardiner
I took a quick trip the windy city today to attend their local Inventor User Group Meeting. Ben Curtin from INCAT covered some great tips with the Selection Tools in Inventor.
If you havent used the section tools for a while, open an assembly and spend a few minutes experimenting. Notice you can change the selection from Component to Part which will allow you to skip having to burrow into a sub assembly to edit a part directly. Ben also covered being able to select one fastener and using the Select All Occurrences option to select all of the other fasteners in the assembly for various operations such as turning their visibility off.
During the meeting somebody asked how to turn everything off in an assembly other than standard parts from Content Center. One way to do this is to activate the find tool from the browser.
From here, select BOM Structure under Property and set Condition to is (exactly) with a Value of Purchased. If you want to use this again, save the search and do a Find Now to select all the purchased parts from the assembly and select Close. Once they are all selected, you can Right Click in the model window and select Isolate to turn off everything other than purchased parts. To take it one step farther, save this as a view rep if you want to switch between the standard parts and all of the other components turned on.
Enjoy!
Garin
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Transmission Box Animation on YouTube
October 25, 2007 12:33 AMby Garin GardinerI am a sucker for nice animations and for those of you that have checked out my blog have probably seen a few great videos on YouTube that were created in Inventor. The other day while playing around with my iPod, I ran across this great little animation and had to post it. Great job to kostucha22 who posted this video from Inventor 11.
Feel free to email me links to you YouTube videos or images. You never know when yours might show up here.
Garin
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Creating Step Draft
October 23, 2007 04:28 AMby Garin Gardiner
When creating face drafts on parts, there are a few different ways to create the draft depending on how you select edge geometry. Here is a simple part with a sketch that will be used to split my part into a few faces.
The next step I will split the face and activate the draft command from the part panel bar. The first example will be to draft the cube by selecting only one edge.
It is often necessary to create a draft that is created from several edges. By selecting several edges it will create a stepped draft from all edges that would be very difficult to create any other way.
I am sure many of you have discovered this if you use the draft tool often, although for those of you that might not use it much this can be a huge time saver for you in case you didn't realize you could use the draft tool this way.
Hope this helps out the next time you use face draft.
Garin
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Autodesk Inventor Service Pack Supports Vista
October 22, 2007 05:34 AMby Garin GardinerFor those of you that are running Vista or would like to use it, Inventor 2008 is now supports Vista. Take a look at the latest press briefing for all the details.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=10218607&linkID=8391941
If you would like to download SP1 select here.
Enjoy!
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Creating iParts and iAssemblies (Video Podcast Episode 17)
October 12, 2007 05:27 AMby Garin Gardiner
Thursday, October 11, 2007 - Episode 17 Podcast Show Notes
For those of you that have a need for iParts or iAssemblies this podcast goes through creating a simple configuration with a few extra tips along the way to help both new and advanced Inventor users.
The Official Inventor Podcast is available for free here at the iTunes store or you can right click here and save the file to your computer.
Don't forget to leave feedback by adding a comment to this post or email me.
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It's That Time of Year Again (AU)
October 11, 2007 03:01 AMby Garin Gardiner
With just over a month left before Autodesk University kicks off in Las Vegas, many of us are making preparations for our classes and getting ready for the well over 7,000 AU attendees. This year Autodesk University will be held November 27 - 30, 2007 at The Venetian Resort Hotel in Las Vegas. With almost 600 classes between the various industries such as Mechanical, Architectural, Civil and Media & Entertainment, there will be no shortage of things to learn.
For those of you that read our blogs, there are several of us (Jay Tedeschi, Kevin Schneider, Myself and many others) that will be teaching classes.
I will be teaching a class similar to one I taught last year on using Inventor Studio, Presentations and DWF files. For those of you that sign up to be a beta participant for the next release of Inventor, you will be able to sign up for a sneak peak to see the new features in action.
MA211-3P Pretty Pictures Sell Products! Enhancing Your Presentations to Effectively Communicate Ideas
MA301-3 A Sneak Peek: The Next Release of Autodesk® Inventor
Here is a sample of what we covered in the Studio class last year.
Hope to see you there!
To register or review classes that will be available select here.
Garin
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Adjust your Patterns
October 5, 2007 08:08 PMby Garin Gardiner
The other day somebody asked me why their feature pattern didnt give them the results they had expected it to. When I took a look at their part, I realized this was probably a common question for many of you that pattern things like holes on parts that dont have a constant thickness such as a plate.
Take a look at the red hole that was created with the hole features that has the termination set to "Through All".
From here we want to pattern it with the Feature Rectangular Pattern with a quantity of four and specify a spacing that looks correct.
Here is where the question typically pops up. Notice that all the holes termination looks the same as the first hole. This is actually a design of the pattern tool to improve the performance of patterns. We found that most patterns are typically on flat stock so we could assume each holes termination was the same as the original. We use this by default to speed up the pattern since we dont have to calculate the depth of each occurrence of the pattern. The good news is there is a simple option in cases like this to have the pattern adjust to the thickness of the part (large patterns will be a little slower).
In the following image notice that that I have expanded the dialog box and I can now see a few more options. In the Compute area if I select Adjust, my pattern will now update each occurrence and make each hole terminate Through All as I set in the original hole feature. Again this will be a little slower on large patterns since it has a bit more to calculate but great to have the option.
Notice with these option set we now have our holes terminating through the entire part.
I hope the next time you run accross this you will be able to easily update your pattern to give you the results you are looking for.
Garin