With AutoCAD Mechanical there are a couple different ways to organize and reuse geometry from parts to assemblies and easily track their geometry. Because let's face it, without 3D, you really are looking at lines and arcs all day in normal AutoCAD. With Mechanical you can do this more effectively with Mechanical Structure.
When a mechanical design starts to take shape, the designer thinks more in terms of parts and assemblies rather than lines and arcs. The whole process of working with lines and arcs all day really starts to detract from the designers actual overall design intent and starts to get rather mundane and repetitive really fast. There has to be a better way to organize data for mechanical designs.
With traditional AutoCAD this may be done with blocks or layer groupings, all which are consistently inconsistent because there are so many ways to miss one thing in make the geometry stop making sense or not visualize correctly. This problem compounds itself when designs are reused in a traditional external reference situation. Mechanical solves all these problems and more and it all starts with Structure.
I put together a nice white paper on how to effectively start using Structure in designs and this is really just the beginning of oodles of productivity with the software.
Download Structuring Data in ACAD Mechanical
Also here is a short video of a very simple creation of a properly structured Part Component in AutoCAD Mechanical 2011.
Creating Structure with AutoCAD Mechanical from Mark Flayler on Vimeo.
I will post more things in time about other aspects of why Structure is very powerful to the mechanically inclined. Look forward to topics of advanced commands, automatic BOMs, and Hide Situations.
Comments