Autodesk Inventor: Tips and Tricks for Productivity

hello and welcome to our webinar my name is Daniel Graham and I'm a product manager here at Autodesk today I'm very excited to be bringing to you some top tips and tricks around Autodesk Inventor we really hope that by presenting these these will allow you to become more productive as you go through your design process so with that let's go ahead and get started and jump into this so the goal for the agenda of this webinar is to present inventor tips and tricks in a wide variety of areas within the software everything from general tips which will cover setting up the UI and application options moving forward to help you be more productive in parts assemblies and drawings not only are we trying to be a little bit broad in the types of tips and tricks that we present in the area of the software we really hope that this is applicable for a wide number of users I really hope that the new users are going to be able to pick up lots of tips and tricks as you go through this to make them get up to speed more quickly but hopefully the advanced or intermediate users will also see a few new things as we go through the session so with that let's get started in some of the general tips so the first tip I want to share with you is one that allows you to customize your UI for efficiency as you can see I have an inventor assembly open if I look at this you can see that my assemble tab is the one that is on by default oftentimes when I'm working in the context of an assembly I have to go to other tabs to gain access to different tools so one of those would be for example I would go to the inspect tab to invoke the distance tool well this is one that I use very often and I don't use a keyboard shortcut for this so what I can do is I can simply right-click say show panels and turn on the measure tool so now right from within the context of an assembly with the assemble tab activated I can gain access to the distance command right without having to switch between panels the next tip is a small time saver but one that I use often and it's around the tool that we have for select other as I hover above geometry and I hold this you can see that we can of course navigate through and I could pick these other things by going down through this list but a quick thing a quick way that I interact with this is I actually just use my wheel of my mouse so now if I just scroll up and down on the wheel on my mouse it's a very quick way to graphically select what is of interest to you so inventor actually renders materials colors and textures really impressively so one thing that I like to do though is tweak a few of the settings to make sure that I have my model looking as good as it can write from with an inventor so one thing that I want to talk about is I go to the View tool and rather than orthographic I turn on perspective and you can see immediately that's going to change the look of the design here and it's going to be much more realistic I think that's very common and I think most people know that the other thing that I want to talk about that I think a lot of people don't know is you can control the angle of that perspective very easily as well with a keyboard shortcut so if I hold down control and shift on my keyboard and then I scroll my middle wheel of my mouse I can control the angle of that perspective so let's do that ctrl shift and then I'm just going to zoom in and out and you can see that I'm controlling the angle of that perspective and you can get a really nice effect with this the other trick that I want to talk about is precise zoom control so oftentimes I just use the middle wheel of my mouse and I scroll it forward and backwards to zoom in and out of my design if I want to make this and I want to zoom in just a little bit the tool that I like to use is f3 and you can see that right now it changes and I see this little arrow so now if I just drag up or down I can precisely control the zoom for this getting it just into the spot that I want to be able to take a screen capture maybe of this design so I've just shown you how you can change your perspective view option the other thing that I like to flip between is the visual styles that we have access to so we can use shaded or shaded with edges I like to default to shaded with edges though and I want to show you how you can actually make that the default and not have to always choose which one you're flipping back and forth between so if I go to tools and I go to application options I can go to my display tab and if I use my settings here I can pick my initial display appearance to be shaded with edges so I'm going to select okay on this and then I'm going to ensure that I have used applications setting for this so what this means is for any part or any assembly it's going to default to the settings that I have here so in this scenario shaded with edges and I'm always going to know that I have that consistent behavior for that look that I like to see so now I've set up the visual styles that I like with inside an inventor the other tool that I want to show you how you can gain access to is one that we offer through our change app store so if you go to tools you can go to exchange app manager and you can see that I have inventor screenshot loaded I'm going to show you how you can get this so if you follow the link that says launch the Autodesk exchange app website that's a shortcut and if you search in this link for screenshot for inventor you can select your operating system in your language and you can see that this is a free download once you've installed that it will actually show up within your application for inventor so let me show you how do I use this so I just go to the screenshot tool here I select it and you have some input options do you want to create a capture of the whole application or just within the document window or a specific window where you just box select for this you can also change and you can have your background be normal I like the colors that I have here or you can set it just to be a white background and what's your output location I like mine going just to my clipboard so now if I just hit save screenshot it's very easy for me to go into for this scenario Microsoft Word and I can hit paste and now I've got this image that I can share this also works great with sending for emails as well so many users of Inventor have worked with other cad tools in the past one specifically maybe autocad and the zoom direction for the wheel inside of AutoCAD differs from that of inventor so an inventor if you scroll the wheel away from you the model goes away from you if you scroll it towards you your model comes towards you if that's backwards from what you're used to and you want to change the behavior inside of inventor you can do so so if you go to tools and you go to application options under display zoom behavior you can select reverse direction you can also do the same inside of AutoCAD if you're used to working in the zoom direction of inventor and wish to change it inside of your AutoCAD environment so that the two are consistent so the next tip that I want to talk about allows you to look at a design from different vantage points so if you take this seat for example if I want to look at this from the front as well as from the side I can simply do so by going to the view tool and selecting new which selects a new one here and then I'm just going to tile them so I can see the new as well as the old instance of this so now if I want to select the back view for this one and the left view for this one I can do so the thing that I like doing though is if I want to interact with this I can do so really easily so maybe I want to look at that hinge design from the front as well as from the side and if I want to start editing I can even do that here very easily as well so I'm going to double click until I get down to this individual part that I want to work on and if for example I wanted to edit this feature I could do so very easily and I can note the impact of this from multiple different vantage points very easily in a nice tiled left and right scenario the next trick is one that I use all the time and I often don't see people taking advantage of this tool inside of an inventor so I'm going to show you this so if I wanted to go for example and edit this individual part that's at the bottom of the rail of the seat I would start double clicking and then I could see that I've activated the bottom half so there you have a sub assembly here I'm double clicking again I get down one level deeper into the design and I go one more and now I can see that I'm actually able to edit this specific part that I want to work on so let me show you a shortcut so I return all the way to the top for this and now I'm working again with it too level c assembly if I hit shift and I right-click I can go directly to part priority and now I can double click the individual part that I want to work on and without those multiple steps I'm able to work on that I can also do that to identify where it is in the feature tree or maybe open it in its own window all of these things are much easier than navigating down until you get to the part within the sub-assembly of the tree so I'm going to return back to the top if I want to switch it back again I just shift right-click and maybe I want to go back to the default of component properties now so the next tip is one that I use often it's very easy but I think that it does lead to productivity gains when using inventor so if I'm looking at this design I can see that a sketch was actually left on so the visibility is on in the part file if I open up the part file I can see that that indeed is the case and I can see a sketch is actually turned on here in the design so if I right-click on this I can go down to visibility and I can turn this off the keyboard shortcut that I want to share with you today is if you note that the V is actually underlined in the shortcut here so what I can do and it fakes it very fast and easy to work with this is I just simply right-click and hit the V key on my keyboard and it turns it off so it's much much faster I think for me I like to use keyboard shortcuts to turn things like that off in combination with the section of the selection priority that I talked about in the last tip so if I want to shift right-click and ensure that I have part priority I can do this in many operations so if for example I have this part here and I want to right-click I can just hit V and it's an easy way to get to the visibility of that very easily as well so I use this oftentimes to turn off and on sketches or to turn off and on the visibility of planes or maybe surfaces that I've just used for construction it's a really easy way to turn things like that off and on in your design the next thing that I want to show you how to do is copy and paste parts or assemblies into your design very easily so there's a number of ways that you can do those and I'll go through that so if I wanted to have multiple instances of this assembly play in the design I could pick it and hit ctrl C to copy and then hit control V to paste and that's a very easy way to do this I can also find where it is in the tree and if I just hold down ctrl I drag it out of the tree and I've created another instance of this as well so I think that those are two very easy ways to create copies of additional parts or assemblies that you want to utilize inside of your design and inventor so in recent releases of inventor we're giving lots of control for the ability to apply materials as well as appearances one thing that I do very often is I apply appearance overrides in the context of an assembly so if for example I find this component here and I just go to the drop down to say maybe for example this needs to have more of a black appearance for a just to pick one for an example I can apply that override just within the context of the assembly now I can do this with many of the different parts and sub assemblies that I have in my design but if I want to remove all of the overrides we make that very easy now so you can go into the view the default view right click and hit remove appearance overrides and that would do that assembly wide all in one step so the next trick that I'm going to show you is how you can split a design without having to create a construction surface that I see people make typically so pick a face start a sketch and I'm going to view normal to that I'm just going to start the line tool and I'm going to draw a line that's just going to be horizontal in orientation I will also dimension it off of the bottom and say that it's going to be 50 mil up so now I've got my design and I'm done with my sketch and that's really all that I need to move forward with this so I can use the split tool and I can go and pick one of my options so I'm going to say split the face what is the tool that I'm going to use it's going to be the line that I just created and now what phases do I want to split so maybe I just want the front face and the back face here and hit OK and you can see that I've created those two split faces without actually having to create a whole surface the goes through that design for that split operation so this next tip allows you to create an aligned dimension with just two clicks I'm going to show you how you can do this so I'm going to pick on this face and I'm going to go into the sketch and you can see that it's under defined what I want to do is I'm just going to start the dimension tool and I wanted to mention this line but you can see that I can make it a horizontal or vertical but it's not as easy to make an aligned dimension so then I'm going to right click and then I would have to pick a line and then I would go through and I would be able to place this I'm going to show you a better trick for how you can do this so I'm just going to start the dimension command click the line once click it again and you can see that it's going to come and be aligned to this directly without that extra click so this tip is going to show you how to do two things one is to turn on a Phillip command that you may not know that you have access to and the other is show some applicability of how it can be a productivity tool for us so we of course have the common Phillip command which everyone is aware of the other one that I want to show you is you can right-click say show panel and turn on your plastic part tools and within the plastic parts we have a rule base to fill it so if for example I want to I have a feature here and I want to say I want to apply a 1 millimeter fill it everywhere where that feature hits the rest of the part I can do so very easily so let me show you how to do that so I've selected this it's going to be the feature I'm selecting the feature I'm selecting the size and you can see that it's applied that without picking particular edges the reason that I like this is is very robust in terms of how this is actually going to rebuild so the definition of this is to apply a fill it everywhere where it contacts apart so if for example I want to make a change to this and I'm going to go back to this and I'm going to say that this design is going to be wider and then I rebuild this notice it's very robust in terms of now my philic still maintains that rule that I've applied that applies a fill it everywhere where that feature hits the boundary of the part so the next tip I want to show you is how you can utilize slice graphics but also some visuals does that work well alongside of those so if for example I'm going to start a sketch on this face and I'm going to view it normally I want to build some geometry kind of under this cover that I see in this location so I'm going to put a slot here and I'm going to apply this lot you can see that it's hidden now because it's underneath this top face and so slice graphics that I'm going to turn on down here is a great tool to be able to do this the only problem is if I want to reference the holes that are in that top face it's a little difficult to see so what I do typically is I turn this on and I go to my view tool and I select the visual style of shaded with hidden edges and it's really nice because now I can see kind of the benefit of sliced graphics to see through the design but also have access if I want to create a relationship to this so maybe I want to take advantage of projecting this geometry and maybe applying a dimension for a spacing between that and I can do so very easily so it's a nice mix of being able to utilize slice graphics but also change that visual style when you want to see some geometry that would be removed by the slice graphic operation so I'm working inside an inventor and I've been working here for a little while and I have lots of different files open so of course have my top level assembly that I've been working out of I have a sheet metal design that I've been working on a couple of sub assemblies in a cast part it's now time to start making a detailed drawing of some of these designs as I start and I go through my base view you can see that I isn't seeing the cast part here and that's going to be the selection that it's going to use by default I can hit the drop-down and I can see the other files that are active in my window but because I use a part number scheme here that's not descriptive I don't necessarily know which one of those correspond to the part that I want to create a detailed drawing of which is a sheet metal component so a little trick that I'll show you if you hover above these it shows the little preview window of this so I can see that this is my sheet metal part and if I just pick this and now I go to my drawing if I go to my base view now it's going to know that that is the component that you want to start making the base view of I'm just going to pick my scale and you can see now that it's going to be very easy to start creating the detail drawing off of the appropriate part that I had in mind so the last tip that we're going to talk about today is also around drawings so if you're ready to make a section view you can do so by just picking the section view selecting the view that you want to section drawing your line for where you want that section view to be and then just hit continue now one thing that you can see is that we can just drag this left to right which controls a direction of that section but if you hit the control key it actually can break the alignment so maybe if you want it down here in the bottom right hand side you can hit that and now you can see that very easily rather than creating the section view then breaking the alignment and then moving its location just by hitting the control key you can drag it off of alignment from the section from which it was created so in the past 20 minutes we've covered lots of tips and tricks and I hope you found the session valuable so in summary let's go through some of the things that we showed you how to do we started off showing you how to customize the UI and add the measure tool to the assemble ribbon this is a great tool to allow you to access that measurement tool much easier as you're working with parts and assemblies the other thing that we showed you is an enhancement of how you can utilize the select other tool so rather than having to use the drop-down you can just scroll with your mouse wheel to access that select other process the other thing that we showed you how to do is use the perspective mode more efficiently so if just hit ctrl + Shift + use your mouse wheel you can change the angle of the perspective very easy and f3 is a great function to allow you to precisely control your zoom options if you do want to set up your application options there's many ways to do so if you want to set up the defaults we showed you how to control and have an application option drive if you always want to use shaded versus shaded with edges or other view display options the other thing that we showed you is how you can access the exchange store to access great tools like the screenshot tool to be able to capture imagery directly out of inventor and place it into Microsoft Word or Outlook or anywhere else where you want to share your designs the other thing is if you've come from another CAD tool or maybe from AutoCAD or you're just not used to the direction of zoom with an inventor we showed you how you can very easily change the zoom direction within an application option also another thing that we showed you is how to efficiently use multiple windows for a single assembly or apart so you can create that new view tile the views left and right and look at the two views in two different orientations while you're working on the design to really look at it from those multiple perspectives simultaneously the other thing that we showed is the selection priority so maybe if you want to shift right-click you can select it to be a part priority so now you can individually select a part whether it's within a sub assembly or buried down in the tree of a very large complex assembly and open that directly or start editing that directly without having to navigate through the assembly structure there's many ways that we can take advantage of copying and pasting parts inside of Inventor we showed you how to just ctrl-c and ctrl-v to for copy paste or hold down control and then drag the part directly out of the tree for reuse inside the context of an assembly there's some great tools that you can apply appearance overrides in an assembly and those are really helpful but we also showed you how you can go to the view right-click and say remove those overrides very easily should you want to do so assembly wide in one operation often times when people want to split faces of their designs I see that they create some construction geometry oftentimes this geometry is a plane or a complete surface but we've shown you in this tip how you can actually just create an individual line and use that line to split the faces of your design we moved on to show you the process of quickly being able to create an aligned dimension so when you're in the dimension command if you just select a line that's on the angle and you go back and you select it again it's going to default to orienting that dimension in an aligned fashion for you very quickly very easily we also showed you how to turn on an additional filler type in the plastic part category and this Filat is a ruled fill it which allows you to have a new process for how you can create fill a geometry as opposed to the standard Phillip that you might be used to using I think this is very powerful and something that you should explore the benefits of the next thing we showed is a combination of slice graphics but also view options so turning on slice graphics is a great way to be able to see down into your part when you're creating a sketch the other thing though is oftentimes you may want to include geometry that would be removed with sliced graphics so turning on some of the different visual styles is a great way to have the best of both worlds the other thing is we moved into the creation of drawings if you have many components open in Inventor when you're creating a drawing one thing that you can do is you can select the part that you want to create drawing views of then go into the drawing and it's going to default to that part even though you have many other parts open when you're creating your detailed drawing the last thing that we showed is how to easily break alignment for your section view so when you're in the process of creating the section view you just hold down ctrl and then you can immediately break the alignment rather than creating the section view right clicking going into alignment breaking the alignment and putting it in the new location so as we start wrapping up this webinar I first want to thank you for the time that you've spent with us today I hope you found it valuable and I hope you learned a few new tips and tricks inside of Inventor it's going to help you be just a little bit more productive in your day to day design tasks

Channel: Autodesk

Views: 54,765

Keywords: Autodesk, Inventor, Digital Prototyping, education, learning, tutorials, tips, tricks, Infinite Possibilities, webinars, free training, training, AutoCAD Mechanical, 2D, 3D, design, software

Id: LtPqQVGUvd0

Length: 23min 56sec (1436 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 06 2014