IMAGINiT Manufacturing Solutions Blog

Designing Inventor Parts for Use in a Collaborative Environment

Many of you work in environments in which collaborative design is not only recommended, but often necessary.  Many of you will also know what a hassle it is to try and work on a co-worker's components.  Many people know how to design a simple part, but they don't know how to design a part for a collaborative environment.  The idea is about keeping your designs simple, and designing using a logical format.

 

Your model tree should not look like this.

 

When I did design work, I remember there always being atleast one coworker who'd submit work with 40+ features in the model tree.  Quite a few of those features we're supressed, turned off, or completely overridden by other features.  It's a mess to work with and wastes time, since someone has to essentially study the part before they can make changes.

 

I want to leave you with a few quick tips on how design wisely for collaborative work:

 

1.) Always attempt to design using your origin planes!

 

This object was drawing using the Origin Point as it's very center.

It absolutely grinds my gears when I have to make a change to a part, and it's floating off somewhere, far away from any logical sketch plane.  You should always use your origin planes if possible, especially on a symmetrical part.  It can make mating parts in an assembly easier (if you mate objects using the origin planes), plus, you never have to worry about your origin planes disappearing or changing during a part revision.

 

 

2.) Fully constrain your sketches!

 

This sketch is fully constrained as shown by the arrow.

 

Always make sure every single one of your sketches is fully constrained.  Try not to make these sketches bloated with dozens of dimensions either.  Changes in unconstrained sketches have a decent chance of messing up your overall sketch.

 

3.) Design in a logical order of features!

 

Design the rough shape of the part before adding any minor nuances...

When starting your design, create the basic shape of your design before adding any minor nuances.  For example, if your going to make an extrusion, draw the rough shape of the extrusion, but leave all holes, chamfers, and fillets out of the sketch - it may take longer to design the part (slightly) but it'll create a more logical design tree that's easy to understand and make changes to.  This is important for several reasons:  (a) it creates less complicated sketches which are easily understood by a co-worker, and (b) it creates less dependencies and relationships between features and sketches (this means the part is less likely to break when making changes).

 

4.) Ask yourself, if a co-worker needs to get make changes to or get rid of a feature, will it break the part?

 

Really give it some thought...

 

After you've created the basic shape of your object, add any holes using the hole features before adding Fillets, Chamfers, or any other commands from the Modification Panel.  This is important due to how the part file is created in Inventor.  For example, if you've placed a fillet before a hole feature, and the hole has dependencies related to the fillet, you can no longer delete that fillet without creating errors (i.e. more time for a co-worker to have to figure out how to fix it).

 

5.) Review your design at the end!

 

 

Doesn't matter how simple or complex the part is, you should be able to make changes to nearly any sketch or feature without it resulting in broken dependencies.  Take the time to go back through your design and ask yourself, "If my co-worker needs to change this item, will they be able to do so simply?"

 

It's worth it to do most of your design work in this format.  As always a logical design beats a fast design every single time.

If you have any suggestions, or tips on how to design in a collaborative environment, let me know what you think in the comments below.

Inventor 2018 - Let's take a Brief Look!

Inventor 2018 is here!  It's been out for a few days now, and I've taken a bit of time to test it out.  I want to go over a few of my favorite additions to the program.

 

1.) Model-Based Annotations

 

This one is quite awesome.   Before you ever even get to your drawings, you can apply all of your dimensions and tolerance information on the model itself.  Once you are done, and decide you want to create your drawing,  all you have to do is drop in your views and retrieve your annotations, and it's a done deal.

 

 

At this point we no longer need to wait until the drawing is completed before we have something we could use for prototyping or design reviews.  We can also export our models with these definitions to a 3D PDF for further review or collaboration.

 

 

2.) Presentations - Surface Data Support

 

 

 

This one got me a little giddy.  Now this may not seem like a big deal for some people, but if you ever need to work with vendor information, or models from other companies, you'll sometimes find that your only able to get your hands on the surface information rather than a STEP file or other CAD-neutral format.  Many people with remember the pains of trying to work with surface data.  Autodesk has now given us the ability to select surfaces, and tweak them.  We can also select a surface on the surface geometry as a reference for our tweak directions.

 

3.) AnyCAD Updates

 

There are many additions to the AnyCAD feature, but there is a HUGE one I wanted to particularly focus on.  We are now able to reference files from future versions of Inventor.  This WILL be applied in Inventor 2017.  This way you don't have to be using the latest and greatest software in order to collaborate with others that might be using the latest software.  For example, there's companies out that there that have to upgrade their Inventor software everytime a large client does so just so that they can be relevant, this is no longer a big issue.  In simple terms, Inventor 2018 is now backwards compatible with Inventor 2017.

 

 

Now, understand that there are dozens of additions to the software that absolutely worth checking out.  I highly encourage you to take a look at the "What's New" page that Autodesk puts out.

 

 

Tips & Tricks: Speed Up Your Inventor Design Process, By Mastering Shortcuts

One thing that will inevitably come as you continue to do your design work is the craving to speed up simple tasks.  You'll begin to notice that you spend quite a bit of time continually have to find and click on the features you want.  Now, many people who have used Inventor for a couple of years will know many of the basic shortcuts - but many more will never take the time to set up custom shortcut commands.

 

Inventor gives you the option to set up nearly any command or feature with a keyboard shortcut.  You can get there by finding and clicking the Customize button Inside of your Options Panel in the Tool ribbon.

Now, it's worth it to take a couple of minutes and figure out the commands you really use the most often before presetting anything.  These will be the commands you probably want to start with.  I really recommend many of the sketch commands, for example nearly any command under the Create Panel, Modify Panel, or Constrain Panel.

Once you have a few features that you'd like to set up as a shortcut, you can sort by Categories and select the category of commands that you'd like to apply a shortcut to.  In this case, lets select Sketch.  You'll see that it filters out every other command except for those which are used during sketch creation.

At this point, it's time to start setting up our commands.  Now there's a couple of ways that we can do this.  Inventor allows us to use Key combinations such as "Ctrl+" or "Shft+"  type commands, or sequential keystrokes such as "CN", which I use for the Construction command, or "CV"  which I use for my Vertical Constraint Command.  If you would like to use sequential keystrokes, understand that your aren't limited by length,  you can even type out the full name of the command if you'd like (but I wouldn't...we're trying for speed here!).  You should try to keep it short and sweet.

Because I spent a lot of my time doing design work, I made sure I set up and test a lot of these commands - and I do recommend thoroughly testing them.  These shortcuts need to be easy to input and remember (i.e. something you can quickly build into your repertoire).  I would almost never need to click up in the Feature Ribbon after I set these up, my left hand would quickly input the shortcuts while my right hand did all of the drawing.  My personal recommendation when inputting commands, is to use two sequential keys and use the first letter as the panel your pulling from.  Here are a couple of examples: "MT" for Trim (under our Modify Panel), "CC" for Circular Constraint (under our Constrain Panel), and "CRC" for Center-Point Rectangle (under our Create Panel).

I highly recommend you set up shortcuts for nearly every constraint and modify command.

Understand that these options are limitless!  Just remember to, again, test these items out - you'll likely have to change them once or twice to find something you really like. 

Supercharge Vault Administration with Powershell!

I spend a fair amount of time working with Autodesk Vault and performing consulting services around product data management. Most current Vault implementations make use of the Task Scheduler and command line scripts to perform things like database defragmentation, Vault backups and SQL Maintenance. The command line answers a need to automate these routine tasks at a basic level but lacks some advanced functionality such as reporting, configurability and notifications that can be achieved by using Powershell instead.

 

 

Powershell is a server side programming language that can be scripted and run in a similar fashion as batch files are with the command line. However, the similarities end pretty quickly. Powershell is a tool heavily used by IT departments to automate the configuration and management of servers in a network environment.

 

So why is this something you should consider for Vault and what could you use it to do? To start with; it comes installed and ready to use in all windows server installations and has an enormous support community. The Vault Data Standard add-in (available free from Autodesk) uses customizable Powershell scripts to function in Vault as well. In short, Powershell is not only for Windows configuration but also in use by Autodesk and other software applications all over.

 

For our purposes Powershell could be scripted to monitor your network license usage or to defragment your databases. Perhaps the best benefit, in a Vault environment, would be the added functionality it has when used in conjunction with the Vault server command line tools. In a word: backups.

 

With the traditional batch file method of backing up your Vault you might use the task scheduler to run a nightly backup. The task will keep the latest two backups on a rolling basis and append log information to a text file each time a backup is run. That's about it. Keeping an eye on drive space, backup duration, backup size and the log file - to ensure that you have a valid backup - is a manual process.

 

While performing the same tasks above, here are some actions that could be added with Powershell:

• Backup success/failure notification
• Save a separate, date stamped, log file for each Vault backup (instead of one cumulative file)
• Automatically delete old log files (and backups) based on any criteria
• Display the total size of the backup
• Display the duration of the backup process
• Display the free space remaining on disk
• Copy the completed backup to another drive

In addition, we can email the key data points above to an IT administrator or a CAD manager who is responsible for monitoring the Vault. The email could indicate success/failure right in the subject line, attach the log file for viewing and might look something like this:

 

 

What if we take Powershell a step further? We could record and report these data points over a period of time. This way you can see the rate of increase in backup duration, the growth rate of the backup (and the Vault overall) in GB or the quantity of Vaulted files over time. With this information you can plan for future Vault upgrades, server maintenance or hardware changes before they become critical.

 

 

It is surprising how often failed backup operations go unnoticed. Too often I see Vault servers where the last successful backup is months, even years old! The lack of notifications, reporting and access to backup information is a primary factor in this happening.

 

For an out-of-the-box backup tool that will send much of the info above by email (and perform many other functions) consider the IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Server. This tool is light on administration and may suit your needs well. Otherwise, if the reporting and configurability of Powershell peak your interest feel free to reach out to us to see how we can help.

 

-DAP