Copy Command - Autodesk Inventor Assembly Tutorial | Autodesk Inventor 2021 IN DEPTH

[Music] hey everybody it's alex with engineering applied in this video i'll be giving you an overview of the copy command found within an autodesk inventor assembly file if you want more easy to understand and practical content like this made by an experienced engineer like myself make sure you like this video subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so you don't miss out on any helpful content like this in the future if you're looking for a specific function check the description for timestamps and if you don't find what you're looking for in this video make sure you check out the other videos in my autodesk inventor series playlist because i know you'll find exactly what you need there let's get started okay everybody so here we are in our assembly file and in this particular lesson we'll be using an electrical enclosure that i've designed for a printed circuit board so in this particular case what we're going to be doing is just taking a quick look around this model so we have some fasteners here so these are some self-tapping screws that thread up into these bosses here on the cover okay so that's what holds this cover down to the base now one thing i want to point out here is that we'll be replicating both individual parts like these self-tapping screws and the entire assembly itself okay so i'll give you a quick look around the copy command menu and then we'll go ahead and use the copy command in a couple of different ways so that you can see exactly what you can do with this the first thing we need to do is we need to go up to the pattern section found in the ribbon here at the top and click on copy so when we click on copy we get the copy command window that pops up so let's go ahead and start in the top left hand corner with the component selection filter the component selection filter allows us to pick up various parts assemblies and so on and so forth that we can later create copies of now something i want to go ahead and point out is the color inside of the selection filter box you'll notice it has a blue fill on the inside that means that the selection filter is ready to go okay so let's go ahead and start selecting some components so you can see what happens in the status window so um we'll go ahead and select the cover here and we'll select the base now i want you to notice that these two parts populate in the status window and i also want to point out that if you accidentally select something so let's say we only wanted to pick up the top cover here but not the base what you can do is you can hold the shift key on the keyboard hover over the part that you want to deselect and then left click while holding the shift key and you'll see it disappears from this window and it also um loses that blue highlighted color here in the window here so anyways that is how we can deselect various components but let's go ahead and pick that up again we can also pick up various components from the model browser directly so if we go over here in this model browser here on the left side we can individually click things we can um hold control and click things it doesn't really matter okay and you'll notice that when i pick up everything in the assembly it highlights the assembly at the top here designating that hey i've selected the entire assembly so like i said before you can pick up various individual components like fasteners individually or you can pick up the entire assembly now as a side note you can also pick up the entire assembly by simply clicking on this top portion here okay so let's do that we'll go to copy we'll just hover over this in the model browser so this is our top level assembly designation here our name for the top level assembly we can left-click and it'll pick up everything all in one go so this is a quick way to select an entire assembly if you want to do that moving down let's go ahead and take a look at our status section so to use this we need to first make a selection within our window here so let's say that i want to toggle the status on one of these screws well all i have to do is click on it and now i have access to these various status options this first option allows us to copy various components so here you'll see copies the selected objects when you hover over this tile what this means is whatever has this little designation next to it this little blue symbol will be copied but not only will it be copied in this particular assembly file but we will assign a new part name and a new part file all together for this copied component so this is really useful if you want to take an already existing component like this cover for example you want to copy it and save it as something else and then create some modifications on the fly while you're in this initial assembly file now this next option here in yellow allows us to reuse the selected objects what that means is we can copy our objects of interest but we're not creating an additional part file or a new part file for those parts we're simply creating an additional instance of those parts in this assembly file okay so that would be the same as using the place command here at the top and just placing additional um components manually okay so that's all your reuse option does for you and then moving to the right we have excludes the selected objects so let's say i selected the entire assembly and one go but i don't want to include these screws so what i can do is i can select all of these screws so i clicked on the top one and then i held shift and then clicked on this bottom one and it went ahead and selected everything in one go and then i can just click on this status symbol here and it'll exclude those from being copied so let me go ahead and do that now i'll set these two to reuse we'll hit next and okay and you'll see when i make a copy of this there are no screws that are copied over now i went ahead and took a step back i deselected everything and let's go ahead and take a look at this first status here which copies the selected objects okay so for this example let's just go ahead and click on the cover here and we'll make sure it has that little blue symbol next to it you know of course we can toggle that as needed but we'll leave it on this first option here which copies the selected objects and then we can go ahead and hit next we'll come back to these additional options here at the bottom in just a moment but let's focus on what these statuses do for us so let's go ahead and hit next and then let's take a look at this window that pops up here this window allows us to edit the various file properties such as the name and location for the copied object on the fly so let's start in the bottom left-hand corner so this is the display name of the copied part okay so like let's say for example we're copying this cover so i'm going to call this modified cover so currently in the front it pulls in the file name so it pulls in whatever is in this string here okay and then we can add whatever we want after it we can also delete that and change it to something custom so let's say i want the display name to be modified cover okay and we can see that changing up here in the display name column of this menu here and then looking at the file name what it's currently doing is it's taking a look at the source file name and then adding something at the end so currently it's adding an underscored cpy for copy okay so what we can do is we can either use the source file name or we can change it to something else so let's say we want the source file name to be um cover revision b for example let's say this is our b revision of this part okay so what it's going to do is the actual file name is going to read out as this but our display name is going to read out as modified cover so let's go ahead and do that and then i went ahead and copied my source path or my location path that i want to use and i'm just going to paste it in there and then now we can just hit ok and when i copy this part look on the left side here so i've got my modified cover as my display name but if i were to look at that file name it'll say revision b so it'll say cover revision b as i've set in that window okay so i went ahead and took a couple steps back let's go ahead and reselect the cover but this time let's use the reuse the selected objects option so you'll see it changes the color and the symbol next to these two entities here and that means that we're going to reuse this part so rather than saving a new file we're going to create a new instance within this assembly so we'll hit next okay so we have this window pop up but this isn't going to be doing anything in this particular case because we're not using that first status option in blue so let's go ahead and click ok we'll just drop this copied part somewhere here in space and you'll notice here it just creates an indexed number two version of the enclosure cover so here we have enclosure cover one with a little one at the end that means it's the first iteration of it or the first instance of it and then here we have a number two meaning this is the second instance of this same enclosure cover we can achieve the same thing by using the place command and just dropping to individually okay so that's what this particular status does for us we're now back in our copy command window so let's go ahead and move down to copy relationships so what this does for us is it carries over all of the constraints or the relationships that we've assigned within our assembly so let's say for example we want to copy the entire assembly and we want to just reuse it so we're not creating any new part files we can carry over all of the existing constraints found in the relationships folder into our copied iteration of this assembly so let's go ahead and give that a try we'll just go ahead and click next we'll click ok and let's just drop this somewhere so i just want you to pay attention to the original here so when i click and drag on the original nothing's moving because all of our constraints are in place and notice what happens when i click and drag on this cover here so usually if you don't check off that option this will be able to move freely because it won't carry over any of those constraints but because i selected the entire assembly and i allowed it to copy the relationships everything is already designated as it is in this original version of it now let's go ahead and take a look at ground new components so essentially all this does is it takes all of our copied components and then grounds it in 3d space or it fixes it in 3d space so let's do that so we'll go ahead and select our assembly we'll go ahead and check this option here we'll set everything to be reused we'll click next and okay we'll just drop it over here on the left side and then now notice i get that little push pin next to the ground symbol that means everything is fixed in 3d space so if i go to click and drag on this it's not moving anywhere okay so if you want to quickly copy something and then ground it in 3d space this is what you want to use now before i go ahead and finish up this video i want to move to the bottom here and talk about the reuse standard content and factory parts option to access this option all you have to do is click this button here in the bottom right hand corner and it gives you that expansion of your menu now what this option does for us is any parts that we're copying that are part of the content center library found in autodesk inventor will be automatically checked off as reused for the status this is handy when we want to replicate parts but we don't necessarily want to create new files for them so let's go ahead and insert one of those content center library parts here in the model so we'll go up here to place from content center and i already have my self-tapping screw that i want to use we'll rotate it around and snap it to this hole let it auto size and let's say we have our first one here so we'll just go ahead and hit this apply button here we'll hit ok so now we have our first content center library entity so we'll just go ahead and hit done and then let's go to copy so we'll go to copy we'll select that fastener and you notice it went ahead and pre-selected the reuse status here okay so this is really nice for when you're replicating those content center library components now let's see what happens when we uncheck this option so we'll go ahead and uncheck that box we'll click on that same fastener and you'll see it doesn't automatically set it as reuse so i typically recommend keeping this checked off because again you don't really want to create new part files of standard components unless you have the intention of modifying them later on so that it can fit within your design that's all for this segment of the autodesk inventor assembly creation module where i give you an overview of the copy command i really hope that you found this tutorial to be helpful and that you put what you've learned into practice so you can continue developing your skills as you work your way through these lessons also before you watch the next video in the series make sure you subscribe to my channel and turn on notifications to stay up to date on future content that will help you create the future you want for yourself and of course don't hesitate to leave a comment or reach out via my website contact page and let me know if there's anything else you'd like to learn about or see on this channel i really appreciate you choosing to stop by and learn with me and i'll see you again soon [Music] foreign

Channel: Engineering Applied

Views: 529

Keywords: autodesk inventor 2021 tutorial, autodesk inventor tutorial for beginners, inventor tutorial 2021, inventor professional 2021 tutorial, inventor 2021, autodesk inventor 2021, inventor 2021 tutorial, autodesk inventor, autodesk inventor tutorial, inventor, how to copy in autodesk inventor 2021, copy tool autodesk inventor 2021, copy command autodesk inventor 2021, how to use copy in autodesk inventor 2021, copy function in autodesk inventor 2021

Id: LqApAGQbaFo

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021