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The Gear Box is the official blog of Jay Tedeschi, the MSD Sr. Solutions Evangelist. Jay will discuss a wide array of topics, including software interoperability, applicability, and hardware/software developments.
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It's Alive...
December 17, 2007, 05:40 PM Jay TedeschiYes, it’s true… reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. I’m back, and should be able to get on a regular blogging schedule again now that AU is out of the way. Not sure how many of you were able to attend, but it was a fantastic event this year, and despite the massive amount of work it required, right up until the last moment (10 hours sleep in 4 days… you do the math…) in the end it was all worth it. I even managed to get some airtime during the AEC/BSD general session, wowing their audience with about 5-10 minutes of Inventor, Dynamic Simulation, FEA and InventorCAM.
Anyway, in the creation of the data required for several of my classes I realized that I had developed quite a dependency on utilities that I had pulled from “Autodesk//Labs_ “ . For those of you who have either never had a chance to visit the site, or have not heard of it, allow me to introduce you. Just browse to http://labs.autodesk.com and have a look around…
This site is chock full of useful, interesting and downright “cool” applets, some of which run embedded in other applications, e.g., Inventor, Revit, AutoCAD, and some which run standalone or in a web browser window. I will highlight a few of my favorites here for you… first up, the 2D/3D tool for Inventor.
If you have a fair amount of 2D AutoCAD data that you would like to quickly convert to 3D Inventor parts then this is for you. Obviously, you will need to install the utility first, but once this is done all you need do is start a new Inventor part and on the first sketch insert the .dwg data you wish to convert into a 3D part into the sketch. Start the utility and a translucent 3D cube will appear and ask you to select a base face. Once this is done you need only select the sketch geometry that makes up that same base face… this geometry will be transferred to the cube. Now you go about selecting the other sketch geometry, which is automatically mapped to the adjacent faces based on your initial base face selection. At this point, a series of Booleans are executed, leaving you with a 3D model of what was previously a set of unrelated AutoCAD drawing views.The best part is that the AutoCAD dimensions are automatically converted to Inventor parametric dims and the whole thing will work pretty much identically to a part created from the ground up in Inventor. There are a few caveats, one, you had better be sure that the AutoCAD data is to scale and accurate, and once you have the data on the Inventor Sketch plane it is pretty much required to move the entire sketch so that one corner of the base view is snapped to the origin of the sketch, 0,0,0.
Next up and the newest addition at least with regards to MSD apps on LABS are the Translator Add-Ins for Inventor and Inventor LT.
As the description implies, with this applet installed you will be able to read and write data from SolidWorks, PTC (both native and Granite data), UG and Parasolid. I cannot speak highly enough of this add-in, and it is most definitely the LABS app I use most often. Works flawlessly… Period.
Check out the list of file formats available in Inventor after this is installed…
Finally, let’s take a look at some functionality that has been requested for several years now, and was addressed by some end user workarounds, that being custom profiles in Frame Generator. This has been addressed by the LABS app Frame Generator Customization Tool.
After installing there is a new icon palette available any time you are working in part mode. It allows you to author and publish an existing or new Inventor Part file, and also enables you to edit the existing profile content.
Author and Publish allows you to specify an origin point, a family name, publish into an existing or new standard, as well as specifying any of the model parameters for profile control. One thing you do have to be careful of, the sketch used to generate the profile is what is used for the profile preview, which is in the upper right corner of the dialog box shown below. Those of you like me who typically do not trim up a sketch unless absolutely necessary are going to find that this is one of those cases where it is absolutely necessary. [Grin] My first pass with this tool had profile previews that bore little resemblance to the part. Other than that, I can’t say enough good things about this app.
The Content Editor gives you total control over the data for all of the existing profiles… and as such care should be exercised when working with this feature…
There are also a bunch of other useful apps up there, for example feature recognition and visual search tools, but I am running out of space to describe them so I will stop here. Suffice it to say that this is a site that should definitely live in a shortcut on your desktop or in a saved favorite. Stay tuned as you never know when something totally useful will pop up there next…
Comments
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February 5, 2008 05:20 PM Gary Harding
When I read your post about presenting to the BSD general session, I noticed InventorCAM. What is InventorCAM? I sell Inventor & EdgeCAM in Australia. Is InventorCAM a product that Autodesk are going to be releasing?
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