5 Essential Tips for BEGINNER Autodesk Inventor users!

[Music] greetings you are watching TFI where we're going back to basics here May we're going back to beginner level stuff for the newcomers to our desk in Venice so if you've stumbled across any of the other videos on my channel you might notice that they are admittedly so medium to high range content very point focused subjects assumes most people have got a knowledge of inventor already so let's not forget about the beginners as always new people coming through that need a few tips and tricks and these are the five things that I remember when I was getting started along with asking banner that I couldn't work out myself they're absolutely boggled my mind now don't be disheartened though you'll not be an expert after watching these five tips inventor is a hugely complex subject and there is there could've been 50 tips in this kind of a video and I've just heard it out of 5 so don't be disheartened if after this he's still struggling a little bit and after a few other tutorials he's still struggling a little bit don't beat his heart and that's a good thing I tell you why mate because unlike there's two things that are certain the first thing with physical objects if they're heavy then they're expensive and with software if it's too easy and simple to master then it's not worth master and that's the case with Autodesk Inventor it's complicated complex and in-depth for a damn good reason mate and it's worth mastering it and it's worth sticking in the time for it so here we go with my five tips that absolute beginners floor desk inventor should probably need to know about remate let's get cracking and the first tip is parts and assemblies I vividly remember this blowing my mind when I was first getting started with inventor because maybe like you prior to use an inventor I had no experience with any 3d card I was used to order card 2d lines arcs and circles so the concept of using assemblies and parts and separate pieces come blew my mind a little bit so the way I'll now explain this to people and it seems to go around quite well is if you look around the room you're in right now right right right in front of you might have a phone you might have a keyboard and monitor and mouse these are items that are made up of multiple pieces if you would a completely disassembled say for example your keyboard and break it down to its component parts and then throw the more on word desk all of these parts here would be IPTS they'd be modeled separately his IP tease the keyboard membrane here that would be a single IP T if that could be disassembled further they B IP T's but it's not it's just one in itself and then what you do is you go over to an vendor and then you start an assembly which is empty and you don't model anything in here what you do is you just say I want to place an IP T into the assembly and you take all of the parts that you've modeled separately and you put them into the assembly and then you constrain them together you push face to face and put a pin through a hole and they're called constraints but yeah in in essence the assembly is made up of a collection of parts and what you can then also have make is you can have assemblies in assemblies say for example is bearing here right if you were to buy this bearing in the bearing is made up of three parts you've got the inner ball you've got to sort this the bearing bit here and then the outer casing those three parts that make up the bearing are a bearing assembly and then you place that bearing assembly into the overall bigger item that you're designing so that's called a sub assembly there you go that's that's how I kind of think of it now and explain it to people disassemble something throw everything on at the desk those are the parts put them all together and you've got yourself an assembly mate and tip number two for the absolute day one beginner is utilizing the end of part I con in the part browser to try and understand how something was put together so this won't help you understand how each of the buttons work as such but it just helps you get your head around what someone was thinking when I made a model I remember vividly looking at this models about 13 or 14 years ago I'd never modeled a single thing in inventor in this very wheel that you're looking at right here remember opener looks it's one of the inventors sample files from about 13 or 14 years ago and thinking how they're how do you even begin with that I mean where do you even start with this but what you can do is you go down to this end of pop icon here drag it all the way up to the top until the the horizontal bar vanishes so you just get it so the first bar appears and you've essentially stepped back in time and what you do is you just grab it again and pull it down until you start seeing things appear and then you can examine the sketches in the 3d features that made up that pot so that's the first thing someone did to model up this wheel and then the model to first spoke and then the spun it around just keep left click drug let go keep left clicking drug let go and it slowly builds up the model so you're almost looking into the mind of the person who did the model understanding what they were thinking as they went through it how they start chiseling away at the object and before you know it mate you're not gonna out stuff like this this is a wheel that I did about a year ago and then do an exact same thing I can drag the end of pot all the way up at the top because even I'll forget how I did this you know I'm looking at no thinking did I I did that okay and then I started off with this sort of plate thing here and I rotated a spoker on there it's all based off from roughly real dimensions and then did the first little wedge here which forms the the start of the spokes and then I'm sketch those out and then got and then spun those around and then eventually you get away you want to be but yeah you can just start stepping through the part to see how something was built it just helps you understand the techniques and the the order of the certain features and what the best way of creating something is if you're just struggling to get your mind set right before you start creating a model that's the end of part I con in the model browser then tip number three may is I properties and bill of materials now on day one when he just getting used to inventor and you're learning it at home and you just playing around with it you don't need I properly you don't need bills of materials but if you're using inventor or learning it with the intention of using it in a job later on then yes it's probably a good idea just to know that they're there don't need to do much with them just know that they're and what they do so I properties let's start with that if we go into a new part but by the way every single part assembly and drawing in inventor will have a set of AI properties will go into a new part go to the file menu here and then I properties or you can right-click on the node and go to I property x' inventor then gives you a dialog box with a bunch of tabs along the top each one of these tabs contains I properties every one of these text fields is otherwise known as an eye property it's a property unique to inventor and you can make of these what you will make you don't have to use all of them most companies don't use these text fields but you can make of them what you will like for example on the project tab there's a few in here that are really port and things like part number because that gets called up into a drawings parts list later on so you can type your partner there your description you can say for mills steel bracket for example or whatever in the description is the revision provision a the rest of them can be left blank some companies won't use all of these some companies will use them all but will have their own interpretation of them things like cost Center and authority but the hell does Authority mean I don't know but it can mean whatever the company wants it to mean so he can fill all them in in go to the physical tab you can put a new material here you can see this is made of stainless steel for example and then I'll calculate mass area volume center of gravity based off of the modeling that you've done and the material that you've picked and you can also create your own property so if you could your company has its own unique properties you can type them in here you might have a unique code for your company which is in addition to the part number and you can add that in and then someone can come in here and type in whatever the unique code is and then that's now unique to that part so those are the AI properties definitely worth just knowing that they're there because they are used in the Bill of material so if we head on over to an assembly this is an iam file got the assemble tab click Bill of Materials and the structure tab you can see here we've got a number of columns this is the Bill of Materials it's a list of parts that are required to assemble and make this assembly so it's automatically itemized all of the parts and then it's called through their part number from the I property so this part here you can see here that item number one part number is M - SP - 107 three and there's its description there each part also has a bomb structure a bomb structure is a little tag label assigned to every single file in order desk inventor that dictates to inventor how that part behaves in a bill of materials but by default everything's normal but you might have something that you don't want to be in the Bill of Materials like say for example if you're a company that makes petal sets right you make the pedals but you make them around a third party supplier - a C for example so we might make these pedal feet here but we don't make these here so when we're assembling this all together we might put in supply but we don't want that ripping out blue materials so you can select those supplier parts and then make them reference double-click in the cell and then make them reference if that tells in vendor these parts here don't use them and put them into a parts list don't add their weight into the weight of my assembly because they don't really exist when it comes to us buying in these pedals or making these pedals so that's how you can set things as reference construction geometry big blocks that your reference dimensions off those can all be reference parts as well so yeah just understand that the Bill of Materials is there that's where everything gets itemized your parts list and your drawings ultimately calculate off the bill of materials and yeah that's your I properties and Bill of Materials made just way you don't need them on day one but just be aware that they're there and onto your fourth tip this is all to do with saving files in an organized project it's file management mate this is all to do with where you save your files and the reason this is important is that when it comes to a 3d car application there are loads of files may you've got the assembly you've got all the parts that make up the assembly you've got your drawings and it's impossible absolutely impossible for inventor to keep track of a part if you move it somewhere else on your hard drive like say for example this blower unit II if I was to take this frame right and cut that and then move that to the desktop right let's just drop this on my desktop and just see what happens so I'm gonna shut down the blower reopen it back up and what you're gonna see is in ventricles right I can't find this frame piece it's went completely missing what do you expect me to do search your entire hard drive and your network all the servers and your company to find this one frame that you've moved no that's ridiculous I can't do that it's impossible so just one move of a file can just completely disintegrate your assemblies and just annihilate them so what's highly recommended is that you create a project and then save all your files into an organized folder structure it's pretty easy to do you just go into projects select new and then say I'm going to create a new single user project let's call this my efi project but it could be whatever you want it to be and then the project workspace folder is like the top-level folder where all of your files are going to be saved underneath so I would click these little three dots here and then save them somewhere that you know like an external hard disk or yeah like a data drive any computer something like that so if for me I'm just going to or my C Drive underneath an Autodesk folder and create a new folder called my TFI project and then click OK in there and then that's going to put what's called an IP J file into that TFI project folder so let's just jump over to my C Drive and we'll just see what it's made there so we're going to see or a desk my TFI project and it's created this IP j IP J is an inventor project file when you load up a project file that instructs inventor to always look inside this folder for any files for anything that you're working on regarding this project so you underneath here you can create a new bunch of folders you can say write will create assemblies that any assemblies can be saved into that folder parts drop all parts into that folder and then drawings for example you can put all the drawings in that folder but you can create whatever folders you want call them whatever you want you can have as many folders as you want as long as they're all underneath that TFI project folder inventors always going to search if anything ever goes missing if you move anything around between the folders in here inventor will always search all of these folders for any files that you might have moved around tip number five out of five is sketching me because this one catches a lot of people out most people that start on or desk inventor for the very first time have normally come from a 2d background so it's kind of natural to try and sketch which is unavoidable in inventor in any other 3d program they try and sketch the way they did in the 2d program hoping that it kind of works out for them but it just doesn't so let's start the new IPT let's jump into a 2d sketch and drop that onto the XY plane so this kind looks like AutoCAD you've got the sort top-down view and you're given lines arcs and circles and what people try and do mate is to try and draw a line and then they'll press escape and then they'll draw another line down here you know the would try to draw a right angle here and then we'll go to extend and they'll try and extend it down and then let sort trim that back to there when all the needed to do what it needed to do was draw a line and then they're now joined it's it automatically joins things together as you're sketching so there is a couple of habits to try and get out of but the way inventor works with sketching is that it relies on things called constraints what a CAD now has them back in the olden days it didn't it was easy to teach this before water cut had its constraints in spiral metrics but inventor relies on constraints so say for example you want to draw a let's keep it really simple a plate 100 by 100 you can draw yourself a rectangle click the top corner and you can type in 100 just like AutoCAD top 100 and then press return and that draws you a plate 100 by 100 and you get loads it lifts throwing around make these glyphs here show you how the lines are constrained so with a rectangle inventor automatically makes these lines parallel with each other it's a rectangle of course they are these lines are always going to be in line with each other as are the top and bottom lines but because it's green that means that this rectangle or a square in this case is free to move around the sketch so you can grab it and then less or move and float around that's non bueno you want to try and avoid that as much as possible so you use these constraints over the top to sort of fix the geometry into place where you want it to be so you'd say oh I want to make a horizontal constraint and I want to line up the middle of the square to the center of the pot and then I want to line up that bit there to that bit there and the same goes for any extra bits that you sketch you don't I mean you can rely on endpoints but you don't have to you can just draw a line wherever you want it to be say 60 mil for example and then you can create this thing here which is a coincident constraint and you just say you snap that under there and I'll just snap it there Mays easy as that so you don't have to be exact right from the bite you can sort of freestyle sketch something that you roughly know what you want it to look like and then once you've done that you can then start using constraints to fix it up make that line horizontal make that line vertical press D for a dimension and you can put in a dimension between these two lines here and then make that angle 90 degrees you could do whatever you want after you've sketched it so try and get away from the AutoCAD mindset of using trim extend and scale you don't need to do that you can just use constraints and then you can use dimensions to make things at their final size and their final shape and position and then those dimensions those constraints control the size of the objects on screen with the end goal being all the lines blue rather than green so that's your sketch tip as tip number five me Reese I've got a few honorable mentions because couldn't even at five mate there's just there's too much here I think an absolute beginner needs to know bow but I didn't want to make it a ten tips thing and the first one is to make don't try and do too much too quickly don't expect too much of yourself too quickly even if you go on a four day intensive atc official or des training course on Inventor you'll not leave it being an absolute legend uninvented nobody's gonna expect that much of you that quickly I refer back to my first point that it's a complicated package for a reason it's difficult to master so me for example on my very first day of using inventor I kind of got my head around the buttons and looked at how things were structured and then over the next few months I modeled the laptop that I was using inventor on that's how I learned Autodesk Inventor I literally modeled the thing I was actually using at the time and that taught me so much about the program to have got decals here putting stickers on the parts how do you I still can't work this out how to put a unique letter on each key I'm having to tackle that yet but just like Phillips and champers and different you know variable radius Philips and really useful experience to go through and model up something that was quite exciting to do quite interesting quite challenging and it was right there in front of me so I can take out a tape measure and actually get some decent size as off it so yeah I don't expect too much from yourself to quickly take it slowly be patient it's worth mastering it but don't expect too much too soon an honorable mention number two is don't don't worry about the application options or any settings or anything ayodhya see there's quite a bit in the comment it's like what settings have you got what application options should I have setup it doesn't matter mate you can just install in vendor right off the box or from the tolerance you get it from and you can just leave the application options well alone invent it does have a bunch of options here with the loaded tabs and a load of things you can take and configure you don't need any of these when you eventually get into a job there'll be a CAD manager he'll set these up for you but on day one you don't need to change any of these to assist you modeling up something that you need to model up just leave that until later on what I'll tend to happen is your thing this this things really irritate me I'm sick of this little dot that's appearing out when I'm trying to do a sketch how do I stop this dotted lines from appearing and then you'll dive into the options you look for the one that sort of roughly sounds like what you might think it does and you'll just learn the options over time but don't worry about these at all you can stay well clear of them on day one and honorable mention number three is it'll do a hardware may don't worry about the computer that you're using on day one when you're just getting cracking if you've got an absolute horror show of a computer or a laptop you know it's 14 years old it's an old dell laptop it's got four gigs of ram it's still running Vista as long as inventor can install an inventor will install on most operating systems as long as it installed and opens you'll be able to learn the program you'll be able to jump into an IP T you'll be able to play around with sketches and draw lines and arcs and circles it'll work you'll just not be able to get on to bigger assemblies which to be honest make you're probably not going to be doing for quite some time if you're on day one so for just learning the program a horror show of a computer or a laptop will not stop you from using any of the buttons it might be a little bit so there might be a bit of a lag here and there but it's fine it's not gonna hold you back in the learning process but in a draw an office environment for example yes we do go for much higher end computers for handling assemblies that I've got hundreds or thousands of parts in them like this car for example you need a pretty beasty computer to be able to spin this around smoothly but on day one don't worry about it too much as long as in vendor will install and open on it you'll be fine and our final honorable mention goes to something which briefly mentioned earlier on which is may just find something that in in the room that you myzel the interest and you think wow it looks cool I'll be nice to model art and just have a go at it just play around with it and click buttons honestly go into a part file and just click buttons and see what they do if you can't do something with the button inventor will feed back to you why you can't do it so extrude it's saying here are you need a 2d sketch to create an extrude feature alright I'll sort guide you through it same goes for revolve you need to discuss create revolve feature will tell you what you need to do some of the tools won't give such good feedback like for example loft just gives you this dodgy dialog box but everything is just an undo step away from being fixed if you mess something up if you open up somebody else's part and then you tweak a sketch and you pull something and it's sort of disjoints itself you can just undo it it's always there alternatively you can just click save save the thing if you know right this is a safe position this is where I'm done anything to it save it and then just shut the file down and reopen it if you completely mess it up in vent it doesn't have an old or safe so you'll always have that safe to go back to so yeah I just find something that you're mildly interested in play around with it click button see what they do you've always got undo or you've got save to jump back to as well and chief there you go as you have five essential tips for orders convened a day one begin is hope you found that useful and if you saw their thinking to yourself mate missed this bloke he kind of talks fast but I'd like to see more stuff from him well then get subscribed and if you gone over to the channel and then select the videos tab you'll see I've got hundreds of videos on invent a day impact like five years maybe I've in fact started a series where I'm covering every button inventor wish I didn't start that now but could I forgot to finish it so we're getting through that there's tutorials here ranging from beginners through all the way to advanced we've got vault we've got fusion 360 there's renderings VR stuff here's PC benchmark stuff for desk in vendor the alloy wheel rim tutorial if you do a search in here for BMW m4 for example you'll see the tutorial appear forgot one for fusion 360 as well as in vendor as well as a tire and forgot I've done that one so yeah get subscribed get liked if you want to see more from the channel and I've had a few people asking about donating to the channel because patreon doesn't doesn't appeal to them but links are in the description if you want to do that I had no obligations obviously but I have been asked but anyway thank you very much hope you found it useful good look on your journey to anyone that just watches this just because for the hell of it then thanks I guess among even sticking through it I'll see you the next one [Music]

Channel: Tech3D

Views: 35,671

Rating: 4.9948916 out of 5

Keywords: Autodesk, Inventor, tutorial, tips, training, guide, modelling, 3D, CAD, 5 Tips, beginner, day 1, learn, help, essential tips

Id: _Rau6GsMfAM

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 13 2018