Customizing the Autodesk Inventor Content Center

good morning everyone and thank you for attending today's webcast Autodesk Inventor customizing the content center our presenter today is kindred Cooper he's a solutions engineer with Hagerman and company before we get started I want to let you know that you're in listening only mode if you have questions during the presentation you can type them into the question panel on the right hand side of your screen they'll be addressed at the end of the presentation as we close down the session today you'll be prompted to fill out a survey and we asked it to take a few moments to fill that out additionally all registrants will receive a follow-up email containing a link for the recording of this presentation with that I'm going to hand things over to kindred Thank You Ashley greetings everyone let's just go ahead and jump right into it again my name is Kendra Cooper and today we're going to be discussing Autodesk Inventor and how to customize the content center so a few basics before we really get started this everybody should be hearing me right now this slide is for those who can I hear me but it also points out the question-and-answer log that we're going to be using during the meeting and at the end so if you have any problems seeing or hearing audio cutting in and out or anything like that you can submit the question into that log and it will be addressed and then at the end we'll have designate a time for questions and answers so let's jump in quick introduction into the content center a little thing I don't have in here in my slide is the last count that I heard from Autodesk was the content center has approximately 1.8 pre-configured components in it and that's a lot of stuff and taking it right out of the box and you've got all of the different standards to sort through you've got the ANSI the ISO the den the JIS s all that stuff to to filter through and there are utilities there to help you do that but on the same respects what comes out of the box the naming the path at which locations files are saved when you bring them out of the content center all of that doesn't always fit into your own company standard so one of the biggest reasons to customize the content center is to reduce how many components are there okay so if it is 1.8 million components I don't know of any companies that use that many purchased parts in their design except for maybe NASA with everybody else we have a select handful of things that we use for most companies that I've encountered at most you might have basic components talking about basic standard inch bolts and basic standard metric screws or washers or bearings or circular clips when you look at just the basic component shape there might be a hundred or 200 maybe 300 components purchased so yeah you buy both but you by various bolts of various links may be different styles of hex head hex flange type things like that but in general scheme 300 components on average so you want to customize the content center to reduce that 1.8 million down to something much more manageable the other reason to tweak it is to change the filenames that they use anybody who's dealt with the content center for a while now we're all familiar with the very lengthy file name that Autodesk assigns to these components sometimes those names make sense to us other times it takes a little bit of a learning curve to really process and understand what that name means and trying to find it in the content center after that can sometimes be a challenge so changing the names to fit your company standard whether it be an actual name convention used or a part number and intelligent part number what have you you can tweak it to fit that and conform to that another reason to do that obviously is also materials while you can place from the content center and place things a custom which allows you to control the file name that you save it as and then you can edit it and tweak the material sometimes you might have to do that every time you place that component out of the content center because maybe you can't find where it's stored on the server various reasons you may have to repeat that process so your your lead time on your design is getting longer because you're having to repeat steps to go back and change the file name go back and change the material for a bolt that you've already used 50 times in other places the other benefit for customizing content center is creating unique components to put in there we all have our own little brackets or housings or bearing or pillow blocks or things that we use that aren't in the content center that we buy separately or we make and we can add them to that content center to populate the library so more on the benefits of the custom content center you're going to reduce your design time you can standardize your component naming to fit your company standards which is going to cut down on your errors because everything is driven from that database table reduce duplication because again you're pulling from that common library you don't have to go in there and edit that file name every time or edit that material every time and any changes made to the library are going to affect all components you pull out of that library in the future so with that the question that always comes up okay well what about the components I've already used there's no utility or process in place when you change the library that it's going to go out and change or update any components in use the biggest benefit or biggest way or easiest way to rectify that is to use Autodesk vault because with vault yeah you can change your master database and change the contents like if you change from a particular material of steel and change it to stainless steel you want to change all of the assemblies out there they use that component and change component to stainless steel vault will allow you to run the searches to find all the instances of that components so that you can change it and get everything updated so what are some negatives to customizing regardless of what you're customizing sometimes there can be drawbacks whether you're customizing an interface an application customizing something an AutoCAD you can sometimes have some negative impacts that you've got to kind of work around and seeing various customers do this various industries various design applications the only two main negatives and I use that term loosely the only two main negatives that I can come up with are here maintaining a library database on each system so in setup of the content center you can either have the content center on each station on each CAD station or you can map it to a network share the most evil approach especially if you're doing customizing is to have it on a network share if that's not an option for you maybe network speed is an issue or network storage is an issue you can have it on each machine the downside to doing that is if you change a content center a custom content center library you have to update that on each machine depending on how many cat stations you have that can be very quick five-minute job or could be a little bit longer the only other negative I could come up with is when you change from inventor release to inventor release so you you create a library in 2015 and then you upgrade your inventor to 2016 you're gonna have to migrate that custom library and I list these as an issue simply because it's a step you have to take after you've customized it that's the only thing that really quantifies it as an issue not that it's an issue in any other sense it's not a difficult task to update each system to have the local library updated today that new standard it's also not a difficult task to run that migration utility it takes a few seconds it's done these are the only two drawbacks I could come up with so running that update utility will migrate it to the current partition so if you're on sixteen that are migrated 16 3 on 17 migrate 17 so on and so forth what gets you stopped by default a lot of stuff to put it short and sweet you've got all of your different main standards out there your answer you're doing your gauss is OG is gb your other library your inventor other library includes some of the less popular or less commonly used standards your inventor feature libraries some basic shapes Konak shapes cylinder shapes box shapes things of that nature parker has their own library in here for tubing pipe fittings you've also have a rounded systems of library if you're using the right of system's module of inventor and you have sheet metal for sheet metal fasteners those are your standard read-only libraries there's no way to make these writable they're stuck and locked at read-only so to start out customizing you need to make a new library one of the best resources to go through and follow is the inventor help system they've got this process pretty well-documented that being said not many people like to read that much so we decided to present this webinar to give you kind of a step-by-step workflow what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to follow through a basic setup process I am going to give you the different steps you can follow this video step by step and get your own custom library set up configured map and your rolling now I'm not covering every single option you can do that would take too much time I'm not covering a vaulted situation it's very similar there are some different steps in the beginning but after that it's pretty much the same for any kind of vault interaction customers and we recommend that you contact us - to step in and help you with that so it's basically a three step process three main steps your first one you're going to create that readwrite user library you're going to add that library to your current project your second step is you're going to add content to your library various ways you can do this you're either going to take what they're kind of copy it over you're going to create your own add to it your third step is modifying that content in your custom library so just diving right into it let's get started on step one we're going to create that readwrite library someone jump over into inventor the very first thing you need to do working with an inventor project file you said I've got a custom content center project file going down in the bottom I want to point out that there's various things that come into play with the content center the first thing that comes into play is the location of your libraries the location of the database that you're actually going to copy and tweak that location is not this path under folder options that's not what that equals this is something entirely different so just so we're all on the same page under your tools ribbon under application options and the content center tab that will show you where your master libraries are located so looking in that folder I see all of my standard 2017 ANSI then feature all these other standard libraries then I've got my custom content center library I also have a couple others in here I'll get to that later but this is the location that I installed them at so when your software is installed there is a default location you can change that location and customize it but if you're ever wondering where those libraries are where those master databases are application options content center tab there's your path now this is using it under the inventor desktop content engine this is setting up a local or a network share if it's a vault situation then they're going to be mapped and you're going to point to the vault so you'll know they're already loaded there but in a non positive situation they're going to be either on your local hard drive or on some network ship so notice that path C slash inventor 2017 desktop when I go back to my project file and I look at my folder options notice this path is different C slash users username documents bah-bah-bah this is the default location when you create a new project and you don't tweak this path if you just accept the default that's where everything is going to go so what happens is when you pull a component from the content center when you open or place we'll say a half inch bolt when you open or place that bolt inventor reads the database reads that table of information instantaneously creates that component and has to save that somewhere it's creating a file just like we create a new part file or a new assembly in vendors doing the same thing it's creating a new part file it has to have a location to save it so if your application options are set to content center standard just so you know what I'm talking about I can here on that same tab if everything is set to as standard then what inventor does is it creates that component and puts it in that location the location listed in your project file under folder options again this is choosing the default path one of the things that I came to advise is when working with this path my recommendation is to edit that path and take out the version number I have seen that caused multiple issues when upgrading from one release to the next because a lot of times inventor will not see the components because it's looking for a 20-17 path and the components were originally created in a 16 or 15 or 14 or 13 so my first piece of advice is take the version number just lead it up to the content centers path contents in her files path and stop it that way when it creates those components it'll mess everything under that master directory and it'll never not find them so step one tweak that path get it set and have it be more generic the next thing to do is you can tell your project file what content center libraries to work with and that is done using this little icon in the lower right hand corner that icon little known guy underneath it is labeled configure content center library's brings up an interface that shows you the path to your library databases shows you all the different libraries that you have map or associated with your project file so looking down there here I've got all my standard libraries associated by default inventor creates a readwrite library for you and it's called my library it's very generic you can use that one if you want or you can make your own we'll walk through that in just a moment looking in here we've got the custom content center library that I created notice there are only three read/write libraries associated with this project file if I uncheck a library that does not delete the library all that does is disassociates it from my project file so if I come in here and I uncheck ISO Goss din JIS and GB when I when I uncheck those and save my project file when I go into the content center I will not see any components that are covered by those standards so it reduces how much gets loaded into the content center the end result of the content center can be a little bit faster if you turn off stuff you don't need so for here I am going to have everything turned on everything is going to be associated and what I've got I've got the content center library that I created I'm also an old one that I need to migrate this is one of the steps you'll do coming from inventor 15 to 16 16 to 17 and 17 to the next person so it's very simple take your library that's associated with your project in the configure content center library interface in the lower right hand corner there is an update tool when I click on that update tool is a basic explanation of what's going to happen it shows you any libraries that need updating so if you have three or four libraries you can have as many as you wish if you make different designs for different customers and each customer can have their own library if you want to go that route and it kind of complicates the mix a little bit but if that's what you need to do is what you need to do so it'll list all of the libraries that need updating simply click through the prompts and you'll see how fast this is go through the library runs the update utility translates all the data and it's done it only takes a few moments the bigger the library obviously the longer this is going to take average size of library less than five minutes probably less than three minutes so that one is already done already migrated I can pull the information out of that library or write information into that library to create your own custom library that is done using the create library icon kind of looks like a book with a starburst coming off of it you can also delete libraries you can also transfer libraries from here into vault and from vault into here and you can also look at the library pop properties so what the library properties does is allows you to change the name of it after you've created it so if you created it with a typo you can go in there and fix that so I'll create a brand new one the name of it is just going to be December content library it's that quick I've got a new redraw library that is associated with my project because of the checkmark okay I've made changes to my project file by using that configure content center utility I have made changes to my project file so I will save those changes get done that's step one step two is adding content to the custom libraries so right there we've already got step one out of the way moving to step two you've got various ways to add the content to the library so I'll look at both paths that you can take on the tools of ribbon out to the far end there is a content center tab on that panel you can use the content center editor and by default it's going to show you what's called a merged view so what that is you'll notice this tree everything is going to be blank and I'm sorry not blank everything's going to be grayed out and anything that you need to pull from here you can pull it and copy it into your rideable library if you look at just will look at the inventor ante library for example if I look under the fasteners under bulbs under hex head if I look at the hex bolt inch I cannot make any changes to any of these default libraries or any of the components that are mapped within those libraries you have to get these copied into a writable library so then you can tweak it so the easy way to do that is simply find what it is you want to work on I'm going to use a hex bolt metric for this workflow right click on it and you can various ways you can do this you can save the copy as a different name to your custom writable library tweak the name if you want to tweak the family description and the folder name it can be an independent library or it can link back to the source to the parent where this comes into play is if the primary library changes the hex bolt metric component changes in the main read-only library any future changes that are made to that like if you upgrade from your vendor 15 to 16 or 16 to 17 maybe the standard changed or the material spec change from Autodesk it's also going to link to that and update your custom library I do not know many companies that are using this workflow most everybody goes independent and runs on their own so you can use the save copy as or you can simply just take it and copy it to whatever library you want to specify so I'll copy it to my custom content center library that'll be the one I work with when I do that you'll notice in the inventor ANSI it stays grayed out but if I switch my view and go back to merged view it will now light up that hex bolt metric because that means it's now existing not only in my read-only libraries but also in my read/write library at least one readwrite library I have a happen to have multiple but it's only existing in one so if I change my view and I go look at my custom content center library you notice my selections windows down I don't have very much in there yet kind of getting started and putting things in here so I've got hex bolt inch hex bolt metric and I've got a company standard hex bolt inch it could be your company name or however you want to configure this you want to rename it you can right-click you can go to the family properties brings up this dialog box to look at different information of the component library itself not necessarily the category but the individual component you can change your standard organization manufacturer spec spec date description you can set a parameter mapping if you need to you can change the thumbnail of it if it's a very tweet very custom component you might want to put a thumbnail image in here whether you do that with a screenshot something from the web or a photo that you take you've got a path where you're going to load that image from and you can do any kind of linking for that component so I've got this component in here that step to adding the content to the library that's one path you can take just using the copy to or save copy as and that will take it out of your read-only put it into your read/write the next method to add the content into your library if you've got your own part that you've already modeled and this is a custom component can be a bracket a custom housing whatever you want to put into your content center if you've got that component you've already created you can add that component into your content center if you need various sizes of this component it's best to create this as an eye part and then you publish the eye part so that's what I've got here I've got an I heart table with four component instances on it just changing a couple of sizes that's about it I've got three key columns for the ID the OB and the thickness some of the components have a chamfer on the inside some of them don't have a chamfer once you have your eye part configured on the tools ribbon I'm sorry not the tools the manage ribbon on the content center panel where you have the editor you also have a publish part icon now what that does is it allows you to specify what library you want to publish this component into what units that's going to go into then what category right here we're using the default categories we can publish it into washers we can publish it into a plain washer if you want to use those categories you can even though you haven't copied any components out of that category you can still publish to that category if you want to make your own categories you can do that as well so I'll back up and show you that back inside of the editor where you've got the categories listed on the left all you need to do is right click actually you don't even have to right click on a folder just a get clarification on that you can right-click an empty space to make a category at the top level or you can right-click on one of the subcategory headings and create a category from there so I'll make a master a top-level category and this will be called custom washers again for the category setup you can load an image whether a small image large image you can load both of them you can set a parameter mapping if you wish and you'll now get a folder category with that custom washers you can create subcategories underneath this if you choose so when you're doing the published part option you can pick that category from this listing here taking my custom washers any kind of parameter mapping I want to do category parameters or any kind of table table columns I want to pull them from the eye part you can do that setting up your key columns walking through the next dialog box you're going to specify the family name description folder name what spec it may adhere to what revision spec you can keep what's here you can tweak what's there rename however you want to specify for yours again we're walking through the very basics of this go ahead and publish your component once it's done it gives you confirmation at that point I will close out this component go into my content center open from that content center and you'll see my custom washers category listed there's the plain washer that I just published so the two methodologies for getting components into the library are creating your I park and publishing that or you can use the content center editor and copy from an existing read only database and copy it into your Rotta library so that is step two step 3 we're now ready to tweak what's their various ways you might want to do this various reasons you might want to do this so looking in the editor going into my hex head bolts one of the biggest reasons is to reduce how much stuff is there again 1.8 million components that's a lot of stuff just looking at your standard hex bolt inch if I right-click and go into family table this is a massive table of information actually that's the wrong one let's do the metric because I've already tweaked that one I'll look at the metric one again pretty big table starting with a nominal diameter of 5 millimeters going all the way up to 100 millimeters looking at the standard hex bolt inch from the ansi library when I look at that family table as it comes out of the box you can already tell it's a large database table it's taking a minute to pull up starts at 1/4 20 covers every one of the size increments up to 8 inches long then it changes to a quarter 28 so looking down through the rows as I get to the very bottom just with the hex bolt inch under the ansi designation there is 1181 different bolts that's how we get to 1.8 million components the database tables get massive with some of these components so one of the biggest things to do is to come into your custom library and tweak it so if I look at my hex bolt metric table let's say well I use I use a 5 millimeter bolt thread length of 6 millimeters I use the 8 I use the 10 but beyond 10 not even using you that for a 5 millimeter I don't use the 12 14 or any of that get up here I might use three or four of those sixes so I'll just use the control key and select these tables I might use the first four eight millimeters I won't use any luck any others and I won't use thing beyond a 10 so I'll just come down through here and select all of these just to make it quick and simple I'm just left clicking and dragging to highlight those rows you can also use shift select to go to the end once you have all the sizes you need selected actually I'm going to use some 42s I won't use any 48 once you have all of your sizes selected right click on the rows delete the rows so that reduces your database table down to something much more manageable so when you're sorting through you don't have to get all these sizes that you don't use you can come in tweak the sizes configurations head-high 3-inch size all this jazz over at the far end what's more applicable and what most people want to change is the file name designation they might want to change the material instead of being mild steel maybe they want carbon steel now you can change stuff here in this table inside of inventor or if you're more friendly working with tables in Excel you can always dump this out to excel in a much more familiar interface or you can use copy and paper my apologies wasn't expecting that kind of a crash so we'll get inventor launched back up here you can bring your information into your Excel spreadsheet use your copy/paste to populate your materials populate your filenames do sorting do automatic numbering when you do your filenames so when I look at the editor and look at the component I've already done in the hex head bolt I've already done a husky engineering for my company standard when I look at the contents of this the table is much smaller than the ANSI standard I do have some half-inch 7/16 1/2 is the smallest one I'm going to use for the bolts I've gone in and I've reconfigured the file names to be an intelligent six digit numbering system it changes increments as the size of the bolt changes I've changed the material properties to be a stainless steel remap the part number properties you can also do custom column properties in here you can set up custom namings you can create custom expressions where you can find certain columns maybe you're combining the file name and the material designation or the file name of the thread designation into that custom column and you can map that to a custom property of the component so tweaking by all means you come in here you set up the table copy the information in you can pull it out to excel tweak it there for your custom components that custom washer that I added the same thing applies you can go into the family table you can add more instances even though I had four members in my eye part I'm not limited to four I can come in here and I can say well four was my starting number I actually need twelve or sixteen or thirty of these guys so you can come in here and you can add the information to that database the table at that point or again go out to excel add it in a much more familiar interface now let's see the other a couple things you can do with the family itself is you can use the material got to set up a material and populate the table if you use an excel this is not as quick and it sells a little bit easy your CRT and other materials you're going to work what we did you can also use the file naming utility to go through into an automatic file naming change for the table and you can move once you create a library of components you can move it or again copy it to other libraries so this is useful if you have a custom library set up per customer you deal with so customer a has a bulk configuration and they want a certain part number on that bulk configuration well customer B has the same boat configuration but they want a different part number that's one of the examples where you would have a different library per customer gets a little bit you know higher on what you have to manage you got more stuff you have to manage and work with but it's completely doable and flexible enough to allow you to do that if you rise that you don't need that component library anymore you can always delete that family that will erase the database for the component out of that database permanently there is no going back there is no undo to get this back unless you have a backup copy somewhere so that was pretty short to the point we took basic libraries created a basic writable library we copied information from existing libraries over into that custom library and we tweaked the information in that custom library again step by step you can follow this video once we get it posted and you can walk through to set up your own custom library if you need assistance in a vault situation I highly encourage that you contact us if you need assistance with further tweaks like doing column concatenation doing custom columns and custom mappings for keys and parameters definitely give us a call we'll be glad to help you out in that Avenue as well so jumping back to it I'm going to wind this up looking at the questions log just to address any questions that have come in and I'm going to try to address these live I'll see how well this works out on this little interface first question is where do you find the my raishin utility part of a new or update install the migration utility is part of the project manager so when you load the project manager in the lower right hand corner you've got the configure contents in our libraries icon and the update tool of the migration tool is listed here the only way this is going to work is you have to have your custom library listed in the path that is associated with Inventor this path is global - inventor not unique to your project file so all of your custom libraries would have to be in this path once they're in that path you'll see the name listed here and you'll see a yellow exclamation mark listed next to it that lets you know you need to get that updated if this is a little gotcha that comes up sometimes if your custom library let's say my library for example it might be listed but it might not be checked if you come into this interface and you see the library but it's not checked the first thing you need to do is get the check mark next to you get that library selected so it's associated with your project once you do that click OK come out here and save your project so that library has to be associated with your project file and your project if I have to be saved at which point you come back in to configure content center libraries and run the update utility if all utilities all libraries are up to date the utility is going to come back and say hey everything's up-to-date or set to read only you should be good to go second question are you able to do all of this if you don't have admin access it's very good question and this is kind of a loaded question because what type of admin access are we talking about in a standalone install where your content center files are either local or out on the network drive you could have a permissions issue there if you don't have write permission read/write permission to a network then you're not going to be able to make changes so you have to get with your IT department and have them give you read/write permissions to that network folder where your content center databases are if it's on your system depends on your windows login if your login is a Windows admin then obviously you're going to have control and ability to tweet that if your login is a power user or standard user as you go down the restrictions you may hit issues you may also be issued if your windows UAC is set to anything above never notify you could have a couple of permissions issues so all of that is working with the install on your local system or install on a network share when you're in a vault situation I will say that you have two roles in vault that vault roles are separate from Windows user roles vault rows roles function on their own and in vault you have a vault admin role then you also have a Content Center admin role and you also have a contest center editor role so you technically got three roles involved if you don't have one of those three roles you're not going to be able to tweet your content center in that situation either so if you're you're having issues trying to tweak it and you can't there's some permission issue going on somewhere first stop should be your your IT department and find out if you have read/write permissions to your folders if you're in a volatile situation then get with your vault admin and find out what kind of permission restrictions I have you under there next question is there a way to tie the content center generated parts to the vault so that they are linked as the same file ok the way this works is very similar to a local install when you when you pull components out of the content center when you pull them out of that database as I said earlier Inventure takes a couple of seconds and it builds that part right then when it does that it has to save it somewhere so in your project manager under folder options it's going to save it wherever this path is listed so when you open it from the content center place in from the content center it generates that part and it saves a temporary copy in this location when you add your assembly to vault or check your assembly into vault there's a different folder path in vault that is Matt or should be set up to be mapped when we do a vault install our fault configuration that's one of the things we do is we map out all the folders and all the paths for fall so that everything works as it should so it should already be mapped and it's going to take it out of this temporary local path and put it into the vaulted path and everything will be linked accordingly so when you your assembly gets checked in the vault it's taking that component with it now the next question that comes up okay what if I've already got this bulk out there and involved and I'm already using it somewhere he's it going to overwrite that copy know the way the vault works is it sees hey this bolt already exists same name same destination path that's the same file that's how vault works it sees okay there's not any changes between these two so when I add this assembly I'm just going to link it to what's already there because it's the same bolt it's the same configuration same path same file size same mammals so it relates it to what's already in the vault you still have that local copy that you generated when you place it into your assembly nothing's wrong with that you can delete that and clean house after the fact it'll relink it to what's in the vault so at this time that looks like that's all of the questions if any other questions come up feel free to submit them to us we'll get good on them and get them processed as quick as possible and get them answered if you have any other needs where you want us to kind of look at your configuration and help you customize it we can certainly offer you a service to do that and take care of that or any kind of configuration needs in the vault for content center or outside the vault at this time I'm going to leave the questions window open for a few minutes to see if any other questions come in I appreciate everyone taking their time and joining us today I hope it was informative and again this video will help guide you through the basic steps of setting up that custom content Center and getting information in there if you need any further assistance please by all means contact us I'm going to jump in here in kindred and let everyone know that if you think of additional questions you can simply reply to that GoToWebinar confirmation or reminder email you received and we can get those to kindred or whoever to answer your questions appropriately and once again if you could take a few moments to answer the short survey we would appreciate it it will just automatically appear as we close down today okay if there's nothing further I don't think there is is that right kindred there's one question coming in regarding the South Library I'll go ahead and address that verbally but that looks like the last question the library is a little bit more detailed than what I've covered here even in a basic sense covering the style library and customizing it I don't think I could fit it into a one-hour webinar we do have a webinar out there on a basic top level overview of the style library and how it works if you need some customization help with the style library we can certainly offer a service for that we also have a two hour class for the style library on how to customize that how to tweak it that covers a lot of the scenarios for setting up custom materials custom appearances bringing in your own images for your surface representations and things like that so there are services we can offer but to cover it in a one-hour webinar there's a little bit too much there - too much detail there to get it all covered in a step-by-step process and actually I believe that all of them okay well this will conclude our broadcast Thank You kindred for the presentation and thanks for everyone for attending have a great day

Channel: Hagerman & Company, Inc.

Views: 10,546

Keywords: autodesk inventor, autodesk inventor content center, inventor project, customizing cad, content center libraries, inventor content center

Id: WyeicKl0L6Q

Length: 46min 23sec (2783 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2016