Ellipsis

Tip of the Day Weekly Rollup

True Story. Lake Oswego was 60 degrees and sunny all week long. That may not sound like a big deal, but it feels like I've been staring at snow for the last two years. Seriously, we didn't have a summer last year in New Hampshire. Anyway, I was able to get the guys to help out on a few tips. Add your own tips too, don't be shy - http://bit.ly/aDthQE 

Are your Inventor assemblies getting an Unsatisfactory when graded for "Shares well with others"? Use Pack and Go to gather up your files. P&G gathers your files into a user designated folder, include your styles, templates, and yes the Content Center files. P&G can be called up by a right click in Windows Explorer (always choose the drawing or assembly) or from Inventor's File Menu.

Large Assembly Management. Charles Bliss said at this year’s AU, that he was able to open up a (put pinky to mouth) One Million part assembly. That's cool and all, but....why? Use the Level of Detail feature to improve performance, file opening time, and your sanity whilst working with huge assemblies.

Frame Generator. Still some of the best functionality inside of Inventor IMO. Did you know that you can place frame members on surface edges as well as sketch elements? Sometimes it’s easier to extrude a surface than it is to sketch out a 3D Cube. Try it next time. Draw a rectangle and extrude it as a surface. Each edge of the surface can be used to place a frame member.

More Frame Generator goodness. I love the mitered corner feature. But what about when you want to miter say a sheet metal part? Publish your custom parts to the Content Center and use Frame Gen "techniques" to speed up your modeling. Check out this example, using frame generator to get the sheet metal parts to have a perfectly mitered corner. 

Sheet Metal. It's hard to say sheet metal without saying "holy sheet metal Batman"...but you will be saying that once you start playing with lofted flanges and roll / unroll. You can even edit the flat whilst it's flat for final clean up.

So as you can see, a few great tips from last week. A few great meals, a lot of laughs and even better content. Can't wait to roll it out you guys.
-Rob

Tip of the Day Weekly Rollup

I heard this Facebook thing might take of so last week I launched a Fan page on Facebook. I know what you’re thinking “jeez Rob - YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Ustream – how do you do it?” In reality it’s probably more like “great, another thing you want me to follow you on…” [grin] Two parts – yes, fan me. Second, no it’s not necessary (although it would be cool), I’m going to post a summary of the highlights from Facebook here for you each and every Monday. Savvy?

Last week’s “Tips of the Day”:

· When placing constraints in an assembly, if you don't want to mess with the constraint dialog box, hold down the Alt key and left mouse drag the part in place. When you select on a round edge of a part it will default to Insert, select a face and it will default to Mate. I've found it to be most useful with the Insert constraint, give it a shot.

· All of your views in an Inventor DWG file can be repurposed in an AutoCAD DWG file as blocks. Drag and drop them from the Design Center into your AutoCAD facility layout drawing, or legacy DWG of a project that hasn't been fully migrated to 3D yet.

· Tired of sounding like a telegraph machine while modeling (the person next to you is...) Eliminate mouse clicks by using shortcut keys, especially while navigating. I use F4 all the time. Hold F4 for rotate and you won't have to right click to exit the command. Shortcut keys are almost like toggles and will save you a ton of clicks. Your neighbor will thank you.

· Unreal Iso's. Did you know you could create an Isometric view of a section view? Once you have your section view, right click on the view and choose Projected Views. Move the mouse in the direction you want to be projected and click. To get real detailed, find the parts in the browser that you don't want sectioned and right click, Section > None.

· A well behaved sketch. A good way to keep your sketches from acting like spoiled children is to make sure that they are geometrically constrained as intended before you place dimensions on it. Equals, Tangents, Concentric constraints and the others are essential, especially when you need to make multiple sizes of the same part.

So if you’re on the Facebook and interested in your daily dose of Rob Unscripted, follow along here: http://bit.ly/aDthQE It’s all about choice and competition…. (that was for Tedeschi)

-Rob