You have just finished an Inventor project with 150 final drawings using your standard company title block. You boss pops in and informs you the customer wants their title block on these drawings and they have to ship by tomorrow. You first response is "No Way" as you think you will have to manually redo all the drawings. Inventor has an application for this job and if you plan it correctly, you will have hours to spare.
Before I tell you where to find the application and you start it, I need for you to be sure and read the rest of this document so it will perform the task you need to accomplish. You do not want to open up any of the 150 drawings so a little upfront work in needed.
The application will automatically replace any drawing resourse with the same name. So if your title block is named "Title Block" and the customers is named "Default Title Block" you will need to save a copy of your default drawing template to a working folder and edit it so your title block is named "Default Title Block". This name matching must be done for all resources you want to automatically transfer and be applied by the application. This includes borders, title blocks and sketch symbols.
I will be automatically be replacing the title block on three drawings and manually on one where the drawing resource name do not match. The manual method can be done but you will have to open each drawing and we are trying to avoid that.
I have prepared my source template so the title block name matches the customers title block. First a screen shot of my customers title block with the name I need to match.
Next a screen shot of my company title block with the title block name changed to match the customer.
Close Inventor and click on Start, Autodesk, Inventor 2012, Tools, Drawing Resourse Transfer Wizard.
Click on Next on the application opening screen and you will immediately see a Windows Explorer dialog box where you can select your source template that you prepare above. After selection, a sub-set of Inventor will start and display a snap shot of your template and all its available resources. Uncheck all the ones you do not want to transfer. In my example, I only want the title block. Select Next to continue.
The next dialog box is where you select all of the 150 drawings you need to process. I only have four, three of which will automatically update and one that will take a manual step. Select Next to continue.
In the next dialog, you want to be sure and select YES to replace all drawing resources with the same name. Click Next to continue.
The next dialog box is just a review of the process you have set up. Review it and if needed select Back to change your selections. Press Start to start the process. As the routine runs you will see each target drawing and the resources being copied to it. You can begin to appreciate all the time you are saving as it runs. Click on Exit to end the application.
I will not show you the finish documents that had the same name resource but I will open the one that did not and show you how to use the transferred resource. Notice in the drawing browser the title block on the drawing is not named "Title Block" but the transferred title block is available in the drawing resources. Simply delete the existing title block and insert the transferred one and you done.
I have a certain note to be added to all my drawings.
"Note: Deburr all Sharp edges."
Is there a way i can transfer this note to all my 500 drawings?
Posted by: Siddharth Parmar | 10/27/2014 at 04:57 AM
Siddharth,
Yes, in a way you can do this. The routine can transfer your note as a Sketched Symbol but the bad news is the sketch symbol will only be a "resourse" in the drawing. You will have to open each drawing and place it. If you have to do this, just open the drawing and copy the Sketched Symbol in from a master drawing, then place it. You might look into a iLogic routine to do this task.
Posted by: John Hackney | 10/27/2014 at 07:52 AM