Oh how the might programmers on Mt. Autodesk have listened to the crys of the mortals. They have finally bequethed upon us the glory of the Center Point Rectangle. This has been one of those tools that have always been on a short list for a lot of veterans to be added to the software. Essentially it will build a Center Point Rectangle around a chosen point and still allow for dynamic imput to the command for dimensions.
Now just because they added it, doesn't mean they did it the best way they could. In fact there has been an addin to do this for Inventor for a couple years now written by a very devoted user by the name of Brian Hall. I was an early adopter of his version of the Center Point Rectangle and still find it better than the Autodesk one mainly because it offers four different types of Center Point Rectangles instead of just one. Here is his video of how it works...
If you are using Inventor 2010, 2011, or 2012 you should just get yourself over to MCADforums and pick it up. Autodesk in my mind missed the boat in terms of functionality on this in lieu of making it simple to new users of Inventor. Personally, I have used this addin with all those versions of Inventor and never once ran into a problem with it. I only wished we could add it to the Marking Menu.
We currently are still using Inventor 2012 so we use Brian's Center Rect tool and if you only want one of the commands out of the four on your marking menu, you can. Hit me up on twitter if you want to discuss.
Posted by: InventorTopixJD | 08/21/2012 at 09:28 AM