iLogic Design Automation Part 1 | Autodesk Virtual Academy

hi everyone welcome to this week's confuse Autodesk Virtual Academy I'm not gonna lie I'm sure that those of you who've been here do you recommend me I'll if you haven't been here before you're definitely in for a treat we have been doing a couple of aya logic and design automation events here in the last couple of months and you know definitely wanted to extend that and keep that moving forward and Thomas's jerell's is on this call with me as well you love to help us with the presentation today so uh all right Thank You Nigel so yeah welcome everybody good morning for those uh that it's still morning and good afternoon for those on the East Coast yo so we're gonna be talking a little bit today about some design automation using AI logic and I witnessed a few of the videos previously and there's been a number of design automation videos out there on YouTube and what Khateeb is done and we've we've shown a lot of the basic functionality by logic and how to work through there but I think today what we want to do is we want it we want to kind of look at an overview of some of the larger capabilities that I logic as and what we can do that in a production environment in order to automate some of our design processes like Nigel said my name is Tom Fitzgerald I've been with Autodesk for about six years now I've been a consultant working with AI logic for ten years now going on ten years now and in 2008 was my first opportunity to work with AI logic since then I almost entirely focused my time on it and how to work with customers and clients to use AI logic at a very rudimentary level and of course now working with other that's at an enterprise level and some of the things that we can do with that so I've been teaching AI logic for about eight years now I had the perfect and great opportunity of working with the gentleman that initially developed I logic prior to it being acquired by Autodesk so a lot of exposure and a lot of time working with with AI logic as it has evolved and developed in to what it is today so with that being said today what we want to do is we want to talk about about the four main aspects to design automation and and these aspects these are the things that have come to me working with I logic and with the demands and the requirements of of customers that are heavily using inventor and they want to be able to make that process more efficient now what can we do what what can Auto DES provide that will allow us to do more with less people so these are the things that I've learned over the years and now I apply these to any engagement that I go into so as end users as advance end users that that we are on this call I mean these are the things that we need to understand and focus on most importantly okay so yes this is this webcast is this is just the overview we're going to just look at a few things to get a broad stroke and understanding of design automation from from a from an inventor standpoint and then of course we're we're going to be putting together some subsequent webcast to highlight and look at each one of these aspects a little bit more closely and maybe even some more capabilities that I illogic provides primarily dealing with drawing automation which to the grand to the larger picture here is something that is a little bit different from what we're going to be talking about here so we want to keep that a focal point later on but today let's understand these four aspects and as we go through them to talk a little bit about them and then of course in later webcast we'll we'll get deeper into them so what are the four aspects of design automation well as a bulleted here typically we need to have something where an end user can input some information I you know it doesn't matter a lot of these projects that I've worked with and even maybe some of the projects in which you're trying to put together we're thinking about put together you know there's there's a 90% chance that not everything is going to be automated there's going to be some information that a human being is going to have to make a decision about and in order to do that we have to provide either a user interface or allow the user to input some information in some fashion so we're going to look at some of the different methodologies we can use in order to satisfy that requirement also then the next bullet point data source where where is the information going to be coming from data sources can take the shape and form of a number of different things a lot of things that we inherently understand when working with inventor and I logic is the data source typically is a model you know we're going to put information into parameters or properties inside of an of a part file or in an assembly file and we're going to capture and use that information so we're exchanging that data it in itself is a data source some other data sources that we can use and this is basic and default information inside of our logic is Excel spreadsheets you know we have a means to connect Excel spreadsheets we can also connect to sequel databases while we can read information from XML files or text files all of these fall into that that that category of a data source where is our information going to be coming from okay the next bullet model development as we all know you know working with inventor you can't ask a number of individuals to create a model and there's a good probability that those models are going to be developed slightly different they're not going to be exactly the same so how do we accommodate that how can we understand what a configuration might be within a particular model how is it developed to you know avoid any of the complications or pitfalls we might come across in terms of inconsistencies with models so understanding and developing a model creation plan or a Stan gender is absolutely critical so we're going to go over you know what we can and cannot or should and should not do with models in terms of automation and then finally the last aspect is the logic the rules what are well how do models interact with one another when they're when they're put together or you know what should we do in terms of conditions how do we express these different conditions and then of course how do we plan and organize the the sequence of steps that need to to need to be accomplished in order for us to have a healthy stable assemblies or or part files what what have you at the end of the automation process you know we have to have a level of accuracy and consistency otherwise you know what's the point of having automation anyway right okay so enough of that these are the four main aspects we're going to brush over these and I'm going to kind of show a few of these off and then any questions that may come up over this process like Nigel said if you have a questions please feel free to ask if it seems like it's a little bit in-depth for you know the amount of time that we have we'll say before the end otherwise we can collect them and then deal with those questions as we go so with that Set let's kind of look at some of the things that I have in store for you guys you know when working with high logic you know some of the basic things you know I'm going to we're going to make an assumption that everybody kind of understands some of the basic things of aiiah logic in terms of you know how to create different parameters and the value of parameters you know we can go and create all these different types of parameters and understand if they're key and add some information and you know if they're going to have a drop-down list err or not so we're not going to go too deep into any of that that should be a known also some of the basic ways of understanding where the AI logic tools are upon the browser on your AI logic form here or I load your browser down here in the lower left hand corner also rules forms external rules you know some of these things we're not really going to talk in terms of understanding those but this is where it's all at so basic automation you know we hopefully we've all kind of understand that where if I want to create a rule you know I can go in here and create a rule and I have my rule editor here and these are the out-of-the-box snippets that we can utilize here in order to generate and create our rules however you know what if we want to take that a little bit further what if we want to to add more to that well so one of the things that I found in terms of generating rules is to really understand and appreciate how inventor works you know one of the the key aspects that I try to convey to anybody that wants to understand dialogic is I Lodge you can't do anything that inventor inherently can do it doesn't change how inventor works it just changes how you work inventor okay so if inventor out-of-the-box default inventor can't do something I logic is not going to solve that problem okay it just is of another means of working inventor to your advantage okay so understand that first and foremost also you know when it comes to basic automation we've kind of seen some things in terms of driving parameters and connected to dimensions too to change the size and shape of things and and at the at the very basic way of doing it so on a more advanced level is we want to understand how can we take information and then kind of change and automate the way we do things at a very basic level initially and then more to an advanced level so to rising different templates that already have you know parameters already in in them and and in allowing different customers or the clients and/or to use some sort of UI in order to change different aspects of our templates like what if I want to change the the operating company within you know my template here how do I go about doing it I can have a drop-down list that basically if it's Mississippi power Ernest in this case I'm going to change the template so that way I have a single template that has enough power to it for us to be able to use across a number of different business systems or business decisions so you don't have to recreate the wheel every single time you incorporate the information into a single tempo trial so I'm going to change the size of this template rather let's go to a size now and it's going to change my orientation and resize it and things like that I also have in this in this particular template the means to work with sketch symbols so if I have a collection of sketch symbols within my drawing resource here I can turn on and control different sketch symbols by using I logic so in this particular template the customer that needed this they had a lot of things going on and they need a lot of things so there's some rules in here that I can't truly demonstrate but further on in some of the later webcasts will dive deeper into some of these rules and how I created and what we can do in terms of drawings okay so templates that's a that's a basic you know the starting point with drawing automation now maybe I don't have this big project I want to put in a place I just want to make my allow my end users to be more consistent inefficient in terms of starting you know their information their files drawing template that this is a good place to start I had another company that they wanted to be able to create arm a file and they wanted to incorporate all of the necessary information into that based upon user selection so they approached me and I said well you know one of the things we can do is we could create a little ilaaha qi here that basically goes out and reads the neck self or excel file and in populated in formation and then we feed that information to the to the drawing template and it basically synchronizes the property so whatever property values I get from the UI get pushed to on these custom properties so that way whatever selected in this UI that's what shows up in the in the I logic or in the I properties on the custom tab these different custom properties here okay another thing is a file naming wizard now how do we control file naming or naming conventions now that's that's typically a problem you know what do we name a file is it something that we manually input what we always want to try to avoid manual input if at all possible would it be better either to have a system generate that that file name for us either by connecting to a system or by having a user input that information I can go in here just apply some in from some numbers is that a part is it assembly you know this particular customer had a lot of different locations and now you know I've just gone through there and I've been able to generate this file name based upon selections and then it's going to ask me where I want to place this file and then I can place it and it automatically saves it for me now this isn't entirely I logic however the the logic behind it that the the rules behind it is all AIA logic it's just in that particular situation I was leveraging dotnet Visual Studio to create the different forms and then collect the information as it washed through the wizard and then at the very end what it does if it passes that information down to the file here and then I just run this rule at the very end to do a save copy as with the derived file name and the file path that the end user selects so the visual studio UI all it does is it if the vehicle to get us to a file name and a file path we pass that information to the template and then it does the save copy as in to that location so you know it's understanding the flow of information now what takes place what do we need to do as if I was an end-user and I wanted to do the same thing here inventor well I would have to do that I would have to go and then go and do a file save copy as and then I have to give inventor that information I have to tell inventor where is it going to be placed what is the file name going to be doing so the wizard that I created does the exact same thing it just it's a cleaner way of deriving that filename information okay so from a very basic way from a basic level you know starting with the template that's always a great place to start with draw or with automation start with the templates because it creates a lot of consistency allows for a lot of consistency now beyond that beyond that you know once we have the templates in place you know either at a part file assembly file a drawing file you know what can we do in terms of creating our products you know I logic inventor inherently as a it's a manufacturing 3d software so a lot of things that are manufactured welded together bolted together you know things that are cut purchase components now we want to assemble we want to put them together and we're creating something of our own and how do we go about doing that well the biggest things of understand of to understand is what I've mentioned previously is in terms of that steps flow so let me go back here to my slideshow and I put together this workflow for inventor and how we use I logic and this is a basic workflow in terms of of what we can do in with inventor and I logic and what we can connect to it or what we connect from it in order to pass this information on so some of the projects I've worked on previously in the last couple years most definitely is customers coming to me and saying you know we have this front end we have the sales front end that you know our sales individuals are out there and they're meeting with the clients and that they have that all this information and and you know these requirements and they want to be able to generate a quote obviously based upon you know the customer's needs they want to be able to generate a quote and then this information is stored there it's being saved in some sort of database or some sort of system and you know I why don't we leverage it why don't we reuse that information so the flow starts you know when we're working with a an ERP or an MRP or some other sales business system that collects information and stores it within you know some sort of data source some sort of database perhaps okay well if it's if it's relative information if it's valuable information to engineering what we can capture that we can we can peer into that that database and take some of that information now obviously this is going to take a lot of research and understanding of what information does get collected and index into those databases and of that information what can we use so there's other methodologies that we can put into place - number one we can directly access the database and and and interrogate that information or we can create intermediate databases that peruse and parse through indexed information and then it just it just takes the information that we might need for our particular project put it into this intermediate database and then from there we can transform that information to make it valuable to engineering okay so we have some sort of data source that we can either input directly we can we can populate that data source ourselves or we can have another business system populate that data source for us so a couple possibilities there once we have the data source we need to take into consideration the logic what are we going to do with that how is it irrelevant to what we want to do in terms of automation if you know up a quote number has these different parameters in it in terms of size shape weight material you know how is that relevant to us in engineering in terms of how how we're going to put together our models right so the business logic and the the rules of how we're going to take that information from our data source and then feed it into inventor ok our UI as I said stated before you know how you know you know I would hope I would hope that we could get to the point in engineering where all the information necessary in order to create even if we if we go by the 8020 rule if we can create and generate 80% of our products without manual interaction whatsoever that would be fantastic however very rarely can we achieve that type of that type of efficiency so almost every single time there's going to be a requirement or a need for a UI some means some logical aesthetically appealing user friendly means of inputting information to supplement the data that we're getting from our data sources in order to fully configure whatever products we're trying to create ok so obviously UI is going to be critical in in most projects that I work with feeding the information the data developing the the logic and then of course putting together the models consumes the vast majority of the time you eyes are fairly simple they can be fairly simple but I would say they represent a very small portion of the level of effort required in order to put together your your configurator other things that we can take into consideration in terms of the UI we can do I logic forms to as a UI we can create visual studio.net forms windows forms as a UI some things that we've seen in previous videos is perhaps using configurator 360 and then most recently the fusion configure product previously known as configure one that Autodesk wired that has capability of being a business configurator sales configurator as a front-end and in passing information to inventor and other CAD systems in order to be a configurator as well so a lot more in terms of where information is going to be coming from from a data source than a UI perspective okay and then over here on the left hand side or the right hand side rather you'll see a little bit here in terms of alt I've had to do projects where arm you know we come in there and we put together the logic we build the UI we assimilate and collect all the data that is needed in order to drive the the the configurator and then finally you know now that we have this configuration we want to preserve it we won't put involved so there are methods out there that we can take information using either the vault at a DIN for inventor and then push information into vault or we could leverage the vault API or the vault data for the vdf in order to create API calls to do the same thing so we can even extend it even further than that if we want to talk about term in terms of vault okay going back over here to inventor so let's let's apply that to one of my first models datasets that I created not 2009 I put together this this data set as an introduction of Maya you know understanding I logic from my perspective as a consultant it's working for a reseller now I wanted to be able to display what we can do with I logic you know so if anybody has never seen this uh this conveyor before it's very very simple it's it utilizes out-of-the-box functionality in terms of the four aspects of a building a configurator we have a UI I built this UI using Visual Studio and one of the cool things about used in Visual Studio and this was before mind you 2009 this was before I logic introduced forms in global forms so in 2009 we only had internal and external rule so we didn't have any other way of developing a UI other than using Visual Studio and what that's one of the wizards if you're not familiar with this tool that we have Wizards here in I love where we can create a rule for a dialog box and basically what it does here let me go and create a new rule here to do a blank rule and then I'm just going to run this wizard just kind of walk through it but allows me to to browse out to a DLL so we can create files in Visual Studio and I'll cover this in the UI webcast later on but we can use Visual Studio generate and create a DLL from that and we place that somewhere and then we can import that deal we can connect that DLL arm for our different classes and different variables that we want to pass back and forth with parameters we want to pass back and forth between the UI and inventor and essentially when it's all said and done it looks like this where it's nothing more than we're adding the reference to the DLL I'm using my eye trigger to call this DLL in order for the form to pop up and then all I'm doing is then I'm passing information from inventor to the dialog box so once the dialog box opens up I'm taking the current information from the inventor model repopulating the dialog box and then that gives an initial and a starting point for the end user to be able to see the reflection the the same values that are currently in the inventor model as in the dialog box so if I run that again so if I run this again you'll see these values are being populated from the model if I change the model and rerun this these values here will change so nothing more than passing information back and forth if I go and make a selection here you'll see that right when I make a selection right when I select something in the dialog box it's going to pass that information back down to inventor and inventor I life is going to start running rules based upon those parameter changes so in my rules if I go into one of my rules here you'll see that anytime that you see a blue syntax here for rule that means inventors monitoring that parameter it's a recognized parameter inside my rule so anytime overall length changes any time section count changes any time section based length length one changes it's going to kick off this rule and it's going to run and anything that is associated to this rule is going to run in a particular order as well so the order in written which I place my rules can vary in terms of the outcome or the or the performance and behavior of our automation not to mention what is contained within a rule you know we don't want to have one rule that has all the information and that means that rule is going to run every single time and in its entirety instead we may want to break up the rules and and organize the rules in a more consistent or efficient manner so that we're focusing on what tasks and what functions we want to do at particular moments in time and we'll talk about that when we get into rule the rule and logic webcast later on okay so the creating a form creating the logic passing the information from the forms of logic is building my models what about my models here you know let me open this guy up and we'll take a quick look at this model right here you know I'm using basically I'm using a base sketch here I just have a sketch an empty sketch that's turned off and I'm driving the size and the shape of the individual components in the patterns here by that sketch so from an assembly level from an an assembly level I'm passing that information down to the individual components the sub assembly components and then it has its own rules that it's firing in order to control size and shape okay so passing information from an upper level down to a lower level trickling that information down to make sure that everything is consistent so you know to in 2009 you know this was what I logic was all about I'm going to put information into an upper level assembly and it's going to trickle down and it's going to change and manipulate my files sounds great performs great looks great however in a in a production environment in you know that's not really a realistic way of doing it that's not most of the time that's not how we accomplish things you know in production environment we're not always just changing the same model over and over again you know we have cart numbers in stock numbers and we have inventory we have to control things in that term so you know if we have a file we have a part that we want to use within a configuration we want to be able to bring that part in with it's the metadata it's part number its stock number you know all the relative business information and then bring it into the assembly and that way it reflects on our parts list or our bomb and you know we can you know move that information down the the pipeline we don't just change a dynamic model we just don't move them up we bring them in and bring them out so in a later data set that I put together we kind of kinda did that but in more of a sense of how I assemblies work in in in the sense of let's have a model that has every single variation involved let's bring it all into one large model and whatever we don't want we'll just turn that off and whatever we do want we'll turn that on and that's how this next iteration this next data set that I put together my play set here that's how it functions you know same thing it uses a visual studio UI so I have an interface rule here that does the same thing I'm just connecting to a DLL passing some information to it and then I have a series of rules that fire that based upon my you I will change my model and some of you may have seen this maybe you haven't but it's doing the same thing as the conveyor except the fact that it's not truly changing the size of anything I all the models in here for the most part are static I'm just turning on and off the different components and sub assemblies that are required for that particular configuration now in my opinion I think that's a little bit closer to how manufacturing lean manufacturing truly works you know we're we're not dynamically changing files on the fly thus changing you know the metadata the the parameters and the properties that are associated with it you know if I take a pipe and I have a threaded pipe and maybe it has a hole in it I'm going to weld something to it you know at the end of that that process it is it's its own part number it's its own item if you will you know I can't just go in there and change the length of that without appropriately you know understanding you know that other information does that change the part number does it change the stock number this is is it going to change the drawing do I have to wrap things I mean we have particular controls and regulations and processes in place to prevent that from happening so what is what's the next thing that we need to do what ideally if we wanted to build a configurator we what we would want to have it as closely paired or paralleled to how we truly do things in terms of design inside of a 3d application and that leads me to my last project that I've done here it was a simple little proof-of-concept the company came to me and they said listen we want to be able to allow our end users to make some selections we have captured all of our business logic in this standards it was like a three hundred and some-odd page standard documentation of how everything in engineering is supposed to go so they had they had cataloged or or syntax all of their processes all of their engineering standards in this one document so it made things extremely easy in terms of understanding the logic and the rules so all I had to do then was to create the models the logic just need to be written you know in a more efficient manner and then present some sort of UI and of course a data source so what I did is I created this AI logic form that nothing is does nothing more than it connects two different parameters okay so I have a series of user parameters here and the reason why I did that is because um you through creating an AI logic form you have a capability of connecting to these different parameters so you know that seemed the the the easiest way of keeping everything integrated right within the inventor environment okay and fYI for those that don't know I you know we're dealing with AI logic for as long as I have I always use user parameters I never deal with the model parameters okay I never rename them I never I never key them I always intentionally purposely create my user parameters so that way I feel like I have more control over the information you know what are the parameter names what is its type how are they organized you know things like that how are they keyed user parameters to me seem a lot more like I said they're much more purposeful I think you have more control okay so I always used to use the parameters just a good rule of thumb in my in my situation so I have this UI if I make different changes say I want a dpi type of configuration it's a steel pole it's 50 feet tall and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to update my configuration which is doing nothing more than firing a different rule that I'm going to show you here in a moment and then once I've updated all the relative information then I'm going to apply the configuration and this is what I'm talking about applying the information I'm going to build this model as if I was an end user none of these files existed in this model previously there was no placeholders I'm not suppressing anything it's not in there I'm in effect I'm collecting information about the configuration from an excel spreadsheet from a data source and based upon that information I'm tasking Inventor to go out find the required files for the configuration bring them into the assembly create constraints on the fly to properly on a place and situate all the files that are necessary ok so it's a fully configurable fully editable model inside of inventor just as if an end user had created it from their own mind okay so and and at the very end of all that once I bring all the models in I'm also organizing them into a you know some of them into different folders so I'm naming the components when I bring and then I'm placing them organizing them into a folder so it's nice and appealing and aesthetic extremely consistent you know if you look here at just how I did these bolts I mean none of these bolts interfere with one another you know this pole as a matter of fact is a tapered pole so the thickness of the diameter of the pole where this bolt goes through and where this bolt goes through is entirely different I actually had to put in logic that did a measurement based upon where these bolts are going to be at and then perused through the data source to find the appropriately length bolt one of the biggest issues this particular client was complaining about was the tremendous amount of field of work that they had to do field edits they had to modify some of this equipment on the fly in the field because they they didn't know how to calculate and understand what was really required so they would instead of sending out you know two bolts of this length and two bolts of that length and then two bolts of the third length they would send out you know a handful of bolts far too long and then put them in place and then field cut them I mean that was it was an efficient way of in an efficient way of doing it so what I'm doing is I'm doing measurements to find the diameter then based upon that diameter looks for a window or a value that fits within there and then find the closest both to to satisfy that length okay so once again that's nothing more than logic if you can capture that logic in your mind then there's means to go ahead and arm and syntax then put that into a rule okay so with the last five minutes and I'm going to talk here it's just a matter of understanding the flow of information as I stated before you know one of the first things that I'm doing here is I'm taking information and I'm going to update all my multi-value list so this first rule that I fire when I first open up this model asks me if I want to update the multi-value list and if I say yes then it's going to read the excel file to make sure that there hasn't been any changes and what this allows me to do is as opposed to hard coding all of my options here inside of the assembly file I could have a single source I could have a database I could have an Excel spreadsheet a single source of information that all of my users connect to to make sure that we are all on the same sheet of music okay so by updating the multi-value list based upon any changes that might have had had happened to the data source maybe some new new vendors came online and we have to put that information into the database for new bolts maybe we get it from a different vendor or we change the cost or their address change or whatever that information might be by connecting to the data source updating the information we're going to see that here inside of our inventor application then the next thing I'm doing is after the lists have been updated then based upon the selections from the UI I'm going to go out to that data source and I'm going to collect all the relative information okay some using the Excel data source which is a shared variable that I do from initially if you guys aren't familiar with shared variables go look into those guide I try to use them all the time and we're going to go into that into the I lock the rule writing and the logic weapon webcast later on about shared variables because they're extremely valuable so I'm collecting all the information from the Excel spreadsheet once I've collected it all then I'm going to do something with it I'm going to do something and based upon what type of file it is I may have to do something entirely different so if it's a poll I might have to do one thing if it's a bolt I may have to do something else if it's an insulator something else so I created all these different functions to identify you fits after it goes through this this main routine if it's an insulator for the Clampetts of the line guard over the bolt kit it does something entirely different it goes and it it fires a different function to apply that relative information differently it brings it into the assembly it applies its constraints it names it and then it organizes it if it's a fastener in this folder and then lastly my last rule is a clear components the purpose of this configurator for this particular client is they would go through the process of creating their configuration and if it was a it falls into the 80/20 rule 80% of the time it would be a standardized configuration but 20% of the time it might be custom like maybe the spacing between this insulator and this insulator might be an additional inch or two inches because of one reason or another so like I said because I'm not doing anything that I wouldn't normally do as an end user I can go in here and I can manipulate these constraints I can manipulate these files without any concern that it would ruin anything this is a means to get to a starting point so they use this they get to a starting point and then they make any changes is necessary okay and then lastly if I want to re create a configuration I can run this rule clear components with nothing more they goes through the browser and just deletes everything out of there so now I'm working with a clean slate once again I don't have any components I don't have any constraints everything's cleared out if I want to run that again a different configuration altogether maybe it's a 1 over 2 with a 40 foot pole update that config apply the configuration and it's just going to build it for me every single time so that ladies and gentlemen in a nutshell is the overview for design automation and some of the things that we can do now like I said we're going to we're going to go far deeper into that in coming weeks so please join us again and stay tuned and and hopefully be able to answer any questions that you guys might have definitely and uh thank you for that tolerance it's definitely we're just goodness scratch in the service here is there's so much that can be done and I'm sure Thomas showed some was definitely some bells and whistles Peter in regards to like what you can possibly get out of the end of you know all of this and we will go over some of these steps specifically in future webcast like constant mention but it looks like we've got a couple of questions here um first one I noticed was from Barren and can you annotate your rules if you have a long complicated rule you want to add a statement to the end of it stating what that or what that you know couple of lines does if you want to show that here real quick toss absolutely yeah I add comments as much as I possibly can to my rules um your here's here's a rule that does a lot of stuff so yeah you can add comments and you can block your code by using the apostrophe and then to open and close different comments and then you can use an apostrophe Open bracket and then apostrophe close bracket to contain that information so as I collapse it here you'll see it kind of gives me an idea or a comment as to what that block of code is so yes very good practice I try to use as much as possible now as you can see here even at the end of different lines just adding a comment to understand what that means and it it doesn't take that into consideration at all in terms of compiling the code yep and that's all that's all call color-coordinated in there as I felt all everything that showing up in gray I guess would be things that are commented is long in addition to a few other things it looks like yeah absolutely yeah anything that's blocks will be you know like this is blocked so it's it has a comment within the bracket so it's like a black but anything commented it out would be a gray and its italicized yes perfect so this is a way for you to figure out or at least go through one of your rules and figure out exactly what's going on or you could even you know have somebody look at it we look well that's the process is actually doing see here another question here from Sergio Sergio noticed that you know a lot of this coding is similar to VBA is there a full VBA interpreter built-in to inventor to be used for AI logic there isn't however VBA and dotnet are extremely similar in terms of their architecture and structure you can use VBA to some sense I know individuals that use VBA in order to test out different functions and procedures and then what they'll do is they'll take it out of the VBA editor and then paste it into a rule and then modify the code so that way it's of dotnet format so I I don't particularly do that but I the thing about it is in the VBA editor you have debugging and that becomes an extremely powerful tool in terms of writing your code that has always been my largest struggle is there's no inherent way of debugging information inside of it I like and we're hoping that that will be coming soon so there's been talk about it but nothing as of yet so that is definitely the way that I would do it if you're not comfortable with coding quite yet that's a good place to start because it does give you the basics of Visual Basic obviously visual basic code writing and it gives you that that power to be able to deep up to some degree certainly and look like you know this is just come up a couple of times here uhm as to organize I was recording how it seems to be on your YouTube channel things like that um they're called actually watching this these are guy who edits all of these videos and then we get working on this immediately after we end and hopefully we get it uploaded this afternoon if not by the latest you'll see it tomorrow morning on our YouTube channel that link is youtube.com slash Qatif technologies I will probably email everyone who attended this webcast today with that email or with that video link once it does come out and if you do have any questions definitely reach out to us in regards to that that takes care of I think like three or four questions that came in the little grids of left zone so what is the advantage of using a visual editor versus a logic generated forms the eye logic forms are limited in their capabilities depending on the complexity of your configuration project will determine if you should if you can get away with using the limited functionality and I'll object forms or if you should use some sort of some other IDE or like Visual Studio in order to develop your windows forms you know with with with Visual Studio you have the opportunity to utilize you know pick boxes and radio buttons and checkboxes and and you can have different forms pop up and you have tabs and you can you can link to other files so I mean it's really night and day in terms of the level of functionality and I found that if if you are trying to put together a full-blown configurator where we're we're grabbing information from a business system and we're going to we're going to feed it into this configurator and then at the very end we're going to get a fully configured model with drawings and and metadata and everything else and associated documentation like from that we can output PDFs and and DW FS and docket Word documents and whatever the case might be so supplemental information by using visual studio you can you can make that process a lot easier but if you're just looking to as a means to input information just to update and manipulate models at the inventor level then by far you know windows or logic forums are definitely the way to go they're a lot easier to put together certainly mobile answers your question band um got some related questions here um so one is um a logic rules are they possible within a two-bit type environment that's one and then two I'm going to use content center parts can you pull things like angles and channels for for logic and use for assemblies and stuff I know that second one is true you can call for things in content center but that first one I'm not sure if you want to answer that one for us Thomas regards to doing pipe oh yeah I can answer it the answer is no no you you you can't truly use I logic with tube in pipe or or routed systems very well or frame generator for that for that matter however once you understand the power that you have with I logic and its capabilities you can replace tube in pipe with my logic rules and you know maybe maybe not one simple or one single configurator but a series of smaller configurators depending on what you're trying to accomplish but um absolutely i i've built configurators or helped companies build a configurator that worked with the oil and gas industry where they were considering using tube and pipe but once we got down into and drill down into what the requirements were we were able to satisfy with just regular investor parts dynamic parts and an eye logic certainly and hopefully that answers your question move on to the next balloon we have a lot of questions on only sure to answer them all at some point I don't know if we'll be able to do them all live but if I don't get to your question I'm not ignoring you just something that will we'll cover after the fact with a via email or something so this one comes from Reed there seems to be a little lot to know before one could even get started with using aia logic in regards to syntax and things like that what's the best place to be able to to start understanding that um if you want to chime in here thomas i think you know there's there's definitely a lot of resources in regards to online you can certainly reach out to us here at Khatib and we do have some some of our lifelines are not lifeline some of our aia logic implementers some of our application engineers can definitely help you out regards to finding out more about things like this Thomas do you know of any really good learning resources as well absolutely um I couldn't have said that better I think first and foremost you know as we know in this day and age you know YouTube just use Google searches in terms of you know trying to gather more information about that I logic best practices and some of the things but most critically most critically I think your best place to start is if you don't understand inventor if you're not an inventor expert you're going to struggle like I said in the beginning of the webcast you know I logic doesn't do anything that inventor can't do so without understanding how inventor works you're going to have a challenge secondly I'm not a code writer I've never taken any code writing classes before in my entire life I've I've referenced a couple of Visual Basic books that I've gotten at Barnes & Noble's and things that I've written online and that really helped out a lot in terms of you know some of structure for doing loops procedures functions how to pass information back and forth within rules and then lastly just like Nigel said you know lean on your your resellers guys if you know these these people work most closely with us they we as consultants have the type of exposure that manufacturing companies working in an engineering company or engineering firms you guys don't have and we are the source of knowledge we're out there we're constantly being affected and influenced by a lot of different projects and a lot of different customers with a lot of different needs so we've seen a lot please you know lean on your your resellers and then they'll lean on us at Autodesk and we can provide as much information as we can certainly and yeah like you mentioned and if you know you're more into the personal terms not personal training per se but um you're more into like that one-on-one training or group training things like that we do have resources for that as well so that's something you want to do a traditional learning course on perhaps and I logic can definitely set something up for that kind of get you started it's definitely not something you can learn in 30 minutes this which is why we didn't fit it in one load cast obviously but you know once you once you get the ball rolling come a little bit easier as as you move forward so I'll go ahead and cover one more question here um let's see in regards to the future sessions so what are they going to this question comes from the V will they include further sessions include a breakdown of how to create you know some of these some of these assemblies from start to finish other videos available things like that I don't think we have enough time to cover the like start finish blank to full slate for you know a lot of these rules and configurators Thomas do you want to kind of go over a couple of the things that you're looking into doing for the next few okay yeah well if we did a video that covered the front two or from beginning to end a process we would have by far the longest video on YouTube no that's not going to happen but the the subsequent webcast will go into you know the best practices of each one of those aspects one of them of course being model creation what what are we going to take what we need to take into consideration in terms of single part models assemblies and then sub assemblies as well so you know we have the key or we have to treat each tier each level individually because as we break down into as we go into these next webcasts and start talking about the inventor API you're going to you're going to understand that the under those are very critical where do my models reside within the hierarchy so yes we're going to be going into some of that stuff for sure certainly so yeah like toss mention if I want to reiterate that on creating the configuration like this you're creating these rules it's not like a one-hour process it's not you know a short it actually did spend in a week kind of deal a little bit more than that definitely if you want to know the scope about some of this definitely reach out to us we can help you guys reach out to Thomas as well if you have any questions for him and then the last question that came up a couple times is um in regard to these data sets are they available Thomas yes absolutely like I said the conveyor and the playset are readily available and if you if you can't find them online I can provide them they've been around for like I said many years now so there's nothing proprietary or near at all certainly yeah so is that something we can add to the the follow-up email will definitely go ahead and do that see if we can get maybe a Dropbox with going and stuff like that so again I just like to thank you Thomas for being here today we'll have one of these sessions probably the next couple of weeks no set date yet but expect it probably end of March probably well we'll take a look at our schedules and um see you and when it's best to do something like this and just like to reiterate if I logic is something that you and your team want to leverage us here at achieve we can definitely help you get started whether it's you know you need to talk to one of our application engineers and figure out if I logic is the solution for your problem more than welcome to have a conversation with you about that PETA for to set our question to you know Thomas or any one of the inventor aya logic team we can send that out to for suggestions and other like looking for suggestions in regard scute improving the product moving forward and if you have any of those suggestions definitely let us know we can pass those on to Chris Mitchell annex team so again thanks for being here today and if you have any questions reach out to lifeline at tv.com there on your screen call that phone number or even the you know email us at questions at Khatib comm if you've got the general question so again thomas elect thank you for being here today you are very welcome guys certainly so thank you all for being here and we hope to you for the next session so have a great day and enjoy the weekend you

Channel: KETIV Technologies

Views: 13,562

Keywords: Inventor, Autodesk Inventor, KETIV, KETIV Technologies, KETIV Technologies Inc., Autodesk Inventor 2017, Autodesk Inventor Professional 2017, Inventor 2017, Inventor 2017 Professional, Inventor 2017 Pro, Shape Generator, akn_include, Autodesk Inventor 2016, Inventor 2016, iLogic, Inventor iLogic, AVA: Introduction to iLogic, Rules Driven Design, Design Automation, autodesk inventor, ketiv technologies, ketiv, autodesk inventor drawing, autodesk presentation, autodesk how to

Id: yJdHdSIW8qM

Length: 60min 19sec (3619 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2017