Autodesk Digital Prototyping - Industrial Machinery

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Archive for December, 2008

Automated Designs

Friday, December 26th, 2008

Hello Everyone!  I had the pleasure of attending a class recently that displayed some exciting functionality for automating designs within Inventor.  How would you like to be able to create an assembly for a particular function or purpose and then define if/then statements to manipulate that assembly?  What if a design becomes taller, or larger in any way, wouldn’t it be nice to apply rules to the design to change the material or replace components or add/remove features as the design changes?  How about an interface right within Inventor that has the look and feel of Inventor functionality to create parameters and rules?  Well, ladies and gentlemen, it is possible, and you don’t need to be a Code Writer to do it either. 

From my experience with this new application and my knowledge and comfortability with Inventor, I am capable of creating rules that seem logical to my designs in very little time without frustration.  I feel that anyone who understands the Inventor workflow of how parts work with assemblies and with drawings will be able to grasp the concepts of this new application.  It adds a entirely different level of intellegence to your existing or future designs, plus the application is small and doesn’t add much weight to the current file sizes, a few Kb’s here and there, so there is no downside to using the application.  Not to mention, the application will be available to Autodesk Subscription Members in the very near future.

Now, I’ve been told not to release too much information as of yet, but I can tell you this…  Get on board with this functionality!  This is what we call in our industry as a “Game Changer”.  This is like having Brett Favre as your flag football team QB or Michael Phelps as the 4th man on your relay team or Kevin Spacey as the lead character in your school play.  This is what is going to make Inventor great!  Well, at least in my opinion.

More to come…

Posted in Manufacturing | No Comments »

Sending Revit Files to Consultants

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

I had an interesting call the other day with an Electrical designer that received an Architectural file from the firm they were working with.  The arch file was over 275MB and they had trouble linking the file into their MEP file.  They tried opening the file to see if they could even open it…but they got the system memory errors and couldn’t open the file.  They finally were able to open the file on someone’s pc without memory warnings, but when they attempted to save it though, no go.  So I had them do a Purge Unused and then try to save it…which worked.  When we checked the new file size, it went down to ~45MB!!  This file of course could then be linked into the MEP file without trouble.

So what’s the point of this you may ask?  When you are sending files out to your consultants, do them a favor (not to mention yourself) and do a little cleanup!  Even if you don’t want to purge your working file, detach a copy (if it’s a central file) and purge that copy.  It will save time copying the file to the FTP site or whatever you are using to share your files and potentially save your consultants some headaches!  Or, the call from them saying they can’t use your file!

Posted in Building / AEC | No Comments »