Import AutoCAD Drawings to Inventor | Autodesk Virtual Academy

good morning everyone welcome to Autodesk virtual academy today on the 8th of June so I'm not illa by your host today and unfortunately not your presenter today we've got someone pretty awesome we've got Nathan alive in here from our technical team on with the say Nathan how's it going good how are you doing Nigel good yeah so Nathan is actually invisible here next to me no he's actually not in the office today but as you still confirm that for us so that's a really good thing uh as we notice a ton of people have a mixed workflow between AutoCAD and inventor or they have legacy autocad data that you know you don't want to lose you worked for maybe decades even on some of the data that you want to make sure that you can leverage some of it moving into your 3d workflows and using inventor in that case so Nathan's kind of going to go over how that works with the DWG underlay technology in inventor I was correct me if I'm wrong Nathan but it was introduced in the 2016 version of software that is correct and they've made a couple of improvements over the last two versions so we're going to go over those how that all works and hopefully you know you definitely see some use cases for it today for you and your company anything to add there Nathan no I'm going to be covering that during the presentation and I'm excited to to show you guys this technology certainly so if you do have any questions I go ahead and post them in the chat panel we've got a couple people moderating the chat today so we'll be able to answer your questions either immediately through like the chat options or during the dedicated Q&A section at the end feel free to ask any questions it might not be related to DWG underlay my gosh a handful or a mouthful as well I will be able to answer those or even follow up you you after the presentation be able to a get you the answers you need so with that let's go ahead and get started and I'll pass on to you Nathan all right awesome thanks Nigel appreciate that so as Nigel said a lot of you guys out there a lot of customers we have a ton of DWG data or maybe we work with suppliers or customers that constantly send us DWG data and you know the question is how can I reuse that without having to you know recreate sketches or recreate geometry and inventor already exists and when audit has occurred that they came out with this DWG underlaid technology which I personally absolutely love I think it's awesome technology so I'm excited to share that with you today in our presentation now as far as my goals for this presentation I really want to give you an overview and introductory look at what the DWG underlay functionality is you know to give you a quick overview it allows us to insert DWG files into either inventor parts or assemblies we can also then work with these DWG files inside of the inventor we can move it around and get it get it located and situated correctly we can create sketches and we can pull that DWG information in to our sketches so that we're not you know redrawing it over and over again we don't want to redo work that already exists then we can associatively update 3d models but changes in autocad and that's really i think what's really cool about this is that you're not just it's not just a one-way street where i can create my geometry and then i'm done but i can actually have active workflows where i do some work in autocad where it's a lot easier and it makes sense and use that to drive my geometry inside of inventor and another way we can do that is by using the DWG as a skeleton for assemblies so these are the the different types of items that I'm going to show you during the demonstration today but before we get at a demonstration just like Nigel said I wanted to give you you know a few quick points about the DWG underlay technology this was introduced back with inventor 2016 as Nigel mentioned each year since then in the 2017 and the 2018 releases they've been enhancing it and actively improving it and making it better and after I do my demonstration I'm going to kind of walk you through what functions you'll have based on the version of inventor that you're using today you know unfortunately if you're using 2015 or earlier you're not going to have access to these tools I'm going to show you today but once you get up to at least 2016 a portion of what I'm going to show you today at least will be available as I mentioned this is really to create 3d inventor parts or assemblies for that matter that associative to the source geometry the source 2d AutoCAD data and the nice thing is that inside of assemblies how we typically use it is we use it as sort of a skeleton where you can create constraints and joints against and that will let you easily locate your inventor models so to demonstrate this I'm going to do two different use cases in our first use case we're going to take an existing AutoCAD drawing and you can see this is you know maybe a simple AutoCAD drawing where we have some sub drawing views here we have some some dimensions and annotations and we have a title block and I'm going to show you how you can bring that into inventor and then associatively create this this 3d model I don't have a picture here but I'm also going to show how you can use your DWG underlay information inside of a drawing it's pretty neat how I think that was added in Inventor 2017 where you could do that so I want to make sure that you see how that's done and then in our second use case we're going to look at how you can potentially use a DWG underlay as an assembly so in this one I have this drawing inside of AutoCAD that just shows how I want my loader bucket here to go together and that you can see there's a couple of ribs here that are missing so what we're going to do is I'm going to bring those ribs in and we're going to use our DWG underlay as a skeleton to locate exactly where those where those ribs go and you're going to be able to see how that works and then you know I'm going to change the location of the ribs and you're going to see how it updates automatically so without any further ado I'm going to go ahead and I wanted to first open up AutoCAD mechanical to show you the first drawing that we're going to be working with this is just so you kind of have an idea of what this looks like inside of AutoCAD and so now let's go ahead and inside of inventor I have this new part that I call 3d plate and we're going to go ahead we're going to start creating our geometry so to import DWG in for me can into inventor there's a couple of locations where I can access the tool so right here on my 3d model tab I can click on my import button or I can go to the tools tab I'm sorry the manage tab and I also have the import button so there's a couple different places on our menu where we can access that now once I click import I can go ahead I can scroll to or I can navigate to wherever I have my DWG file and open it and the first thing it's going to ask is you know what plane do you want to put this on - I want my top plane in our case to be my primary plane so I'm going to select that one then it's prompting us to specify the origin for the DWG drawing so I'm going to click there and you can see now we have it loaded into our part file I'm going to bring up the top view here and notice that we we did bring in our DWG geometry but I have two problems with where I put it initially first of all my drawing is upside down which I don't really want it to be upside down and the second issue I have is that if I notice the center point or the point of origin of my part is way up here and the geometry I want to use is way down here and you know for example we could put our point in the lower corner but I'm going to go ahead I'm going to put it in the middle of our hole in the center of our part so how do I do that well notice that when we put our DWG underlay it shows up here inside of our model browser so I can right click on that DWG underlay and I have a whole host of different options by default as I mentioned this is an associative connection to that AutoCAD drawing but if for some reason I don't want it to be associative I can break that link right here in my right right-click menu now what we want to do is we want to go ahead and translate it so I'm going to open the translate tool and what that's going to allow me to do is I'm first going to locate my origin of my part to be right here in this center of my top view and then as I mentioned it's upside down and I want my drawing to be rotated 180 degrees so I'm just going to grab that little handle that it shows on my screen and rotate it around so now with that one command I fixed both of those initial problems you can see that now my point of origin of my part is in the center of the plate that I'm going to be modeling so I like where that's located and my drawing is oriented correctly now inside of inventor I don't really want this title block you know I don't want some of these hidden lines in here so notice that we have access to all of the AutoCAD layers right here inside of inventor and this lets me go in very quickly and to start deciding which elements I want and which elements I don't want to be shown so I can turn off my hidden lines my title block and I can get down to just the information I want in order to turn this drawing into a 3d model now in addition to that notice that right now I'm in a top view and this is going to be my front view and this you know would be a right side view if you will so since I'm in my top view all I really want to see is just my top view portion so in 2017 they added the ability for us to crop the DWG so I can just go in here and say you know in this particular view that's all the information I want to see and then it's going to crop out all of the other information that I don't need so for first part as we create geometry I don't really need my dimensions so I'm going to go ahead and turn my dimensions back off here and now I'm left with just the geometry I want to start creating sketches inside of Inventor so how do we create sketches or how do we use this information I should say to create sketches that will let us create our model so I can go ahead and we're going to pick my top plane here and then I'm going to start my sketch and with inventor 2016 they added this new command on our project geometry menu it's called project DWG geometry so when I activate that I get this little mini toolbar and if I hover over these options I have the option to either project single items connected geometry or if I have blocks I can select blocks and to show you an example of what each of those look like if I'm in single geometry mode notice that I can project single entities like lines arcs circles and so forth inside of my drawing if I select connected geometry it's going to infer different lines that are connected together and give me different options and then blocks if I don't have any blocks then nothing will show up you know I can't select anything you can see here in my AutoCAD file I did select my perimeter I created my perimeter as a block so I'm going to go ahead and select that and notice that it turns yellow which means that I projected it into my sketch that I'm currently creating and then I'll also go ahead and I'll select this middle hole and that's all the geometry that I want for this and 20:18 by the way if you do select the auto project geometry we now support that but for this example I'm just going to manually select what I want to project into each of the sketches that I create so now the way I designed this you can see that my front plane is actually in the center of my part so let me scroll this around so you can see it a little bit better and I actually want to plane here on the front of my part where I'm going to put my front view so what I'm going to do with this front plane selected I'm just going to go ahead and create a parallel plane through a point and I'm going to pick the point at the front of my part now at this point I want to bring in another copy of my DWG underlay so I can place it on my front plane we need a new copy for each different plane that you want to put your DWG underlay onto I can go through the same process where I click import and I can import it again or they've added a shortcut where I can right-click the DWG underlay in my model browser and I can just say add an instance and when I add an instance again notice that I'm prompted for another new plane in this case we're going to pick the front plane and then I'm prompted for a new point of origin and I'm going to go ahead I'm going to select the centerline of our bottom face there so now notice it's inserted another new copy and what I also want to point out is that whatever whatever changes I make to one instance of my DWG underlay it makes the changes to the other ones as well as far as layer visibility is concerned so if I turn on dimensions it's going to turn on dimensions not in just the underlay that I have active but all of my underlays so I'm going to go ahead and turn on v dimensions let me flip to a front view we need to crop this out because all we need for our front view is just this little portion right here so let's go ahead and and crop it and then just like we did before I want this to be located here where my other part is and I want it to be on the center let me just real quickly get rid of the D dimensions again to make this just a little bit easier to see so now I want to go ahead and I want to translate this just like I did the other one we want this to be with our insertion point we want it to be rotated around 180 degrees and I could type that in if I wanted to I'm just doing it with the drag-and-drop method and now once I place that you'll see that I basically have my sketches lined up how they would be oriented with respect to each other and three where I have my top view on my top plane I have my front view on my front plane and I have them lined up together so just to make this a little bit easier to see I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to hide the the top you and we're going to go ahead and create a sketch on our front work plane right here and then I'll hide that to get that out of the way and just like we did before I'm going to use my projected w/g geometry tool and this time I'm going to select the option for connected geometry and I'm going to just select the perimeter or the outside of my my part right there so now if I finish my sketch if I hide my DWG underlay and I show my sketches you'll see that we basically use our DWG file to quickly come in and get my sketches set up so I can start creating my part now at this point we can start extruding we can start revolving sweeping you know the typical type of features that we create with Inventor so what I'm going to do you know I could extrude this first or I could extrude this face first I'm going to pick this face and notice that instead of saying hey I want to extrude this a certain distance I'm going to set a reference to this point in my DWG underlay and that will create an associative link back to it so that when I update my DWG underlay my geometry will update along with it so now when I click OK we have our first feature ready you can see that we're now starting to turn that 2d DWG geometry into 3d models then I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to take the other sketch that I've created I'm going to create another extrusion and this time I'm going to use a function that you know maybe you're familiar with maybe you're not instead of a cut which would only lead me with these two solid pieces right here I'm going to select this intersect option and what that essentially does is it takes my profile it moves it through the part and whatever part of this geometry that falls within this profile it keeps and it cuts or gets rid of everything else so in this situation it's a very easy fast way for me to make these cuts without having to create a new sketch and to be able to do that in one one fell swoop so now let's look at how we can start projecting and using more of our DWG underlay to finish this out and create some additional features so I'm going to go ahead and turn the visibility back on so that we can see what we're doing on the back side and actually first let me come in the front side this is where we want our holes so I can go ahead and create a sketch there and I just wanted to show you another you know tip or trick when you're working with inventor that you may or may not be aware of but when I go in to project this geometry I'm going to select these holes and notice that right now I can't see the holes so it doesn't look like I really did anything but if I turn around I can see they're my holes are on that front face where I'm creating my sketch now inside of inventor there is a way that we can control that if I go to my tools menu in my applications option and I go to my sketch notice that we have this little option down here on sketch display if I move this over and click apply but it's going to show my sketch entities through the part regardless of whether or not geometry blocks my sketch plain view so that's something that you're interested in doing it's a nice little tip and trick to make it easier to understand so I'm going to go back and I'm going to finish my DWG projection I'm going to go and project these other two holes and we'll go ahead we'll finish up that sketch so now we want to go ahead and go on and create those holes real fast so we'll use the hole tool we'll select those sketch points and now instead of having to go in and say you know how big is that hole what I can essentially do is just say let's measure the diameter of that hole and it will automatically set them to be the right the right diameter so now I'm just going to go I'm going to instead of projecting this on the front face this last hole I'm going to just project right here on the back face going to open up the hole tool again and create that hole real fast and then I want to show another another thing that you can do is we can use the geometry that we've created and we can combine it with regular inventor type features so if I want to create a circular pattern I can go in and select that hole rotate it around my center axis here in this case you can see I need seven holes instead of the default six so when I change that to seven I now have this part the way I need it all right so at this point I'm going to go ahead and save my part and I want to show how we can use this now inside of a drawing so if I go ahead and and before we go to the drawing I'm going to do one thing real quick I'm going to go to my layer visibility I'm going to turn on my dimensions so that they show up and then I'm going to go and I'm going to hide this so that it doesn't show up in my 3d view but but we have those those layers turned on now I have the option I can go in here and I can create dimensions right here if I want or I can take advantage of the fact that we have this three 3b or I'm sorry this 2d underlay in my part and notice that if I go here under my model to that DWG underlay I can right click select include and now it's actually going to display whatever layers I have visible for my DWG underlay and it's also going to respect the cropping that I did to show just the part of the DWG underlay that's pertinent to my view and I'm going to go and I'm going to do that to my other view here here's my other view and here's that DWG underlay I'm going to right click and select include and it's going to include those dimensions as well so now let's see what happens when I go back to my AutoCAD drawing and I'm going to make a few little changes so I'm going to take this this Center hole right here and instead of it being a T I'm going to change that value sixty-four radius and then I'm going to come down here to my bottom view and I'm going to move these two I'm basically going to Y make this thicker by 25 millimeters then of course I'll stretch this back out so that everything connects properly inside of AutoCAD and then we're also going to fix this dimension so that it shows up correctly all right so you can see I just made a few quick changes to my DWG I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to save that and now notice that when I go back to inventor I'm going to go back to my part first notice that we have these little lightning symbols next to the our DWG underlays and that's to indicate to us that it's been updated and we need to refresh our part or update our part to reflect those changes now notice that it made those changes appropriately just like we told it to and now if I go back to my drawing it also automatically updates with those changes as well and it looks like I accidentally also moved the center here let me move that back let me receive it go back to inventor and update it again so that it shows up correctly and so now you can see that any of those changes that we make back in our AutoCAD file as soon as I update those they get updated inside of inventor so one great use case for that is you know I know a lot of our customers sometimes have very intricate profiles that they need to extrude and you could create those in AutoCAD where you know maybe it's easier to create those like those type of extruded profiles and you can bring those into your sketch environment and use them directly without having to re redraw them inside of inventor so now I want to go to my second use case that I wanted to show and this this is the bucket loader and as I mentioned we want to go ahead and put some ribs on here now if I'm using inventor 2017 or inventor 2016 the only way I can use DWG underlays inside of assemblies is by putting them into a part first and then using it in the assembly in 2018 I can bring it in direct and I'll show you that in just a minute but for now I'm going to show you the method that would have to be used again if you're in inventor 2016 or 2017 so here I opened up that part and this is just a blank part that I had put inside of my assembly where I have my origin point right here and I'm going to import my bucket underlay drawing very similarly to how I did it in my previous example so I'm going to go ahead I'm going to put it on my front plane this time because that's the way I have it set up in my assembly and then just like we did before we're going to go and we're going to translate it so that my origin lines up with the center of my my part right here so now that I've done that when I go back to my assembly notice that my DWG overlay or underlay now shows up right where I have this bucket selection part located so if I go to the back you can see I have it lined up with my model now I want to go ahead and use this to locate a couple of Reds that we're going to insert so I'm going to go to my assemble tab and we're going to insert this bucket rib that I have created I'm going to go ahead and put in a couple of different instances and then I'm going to use my constraint tool to quickly attach the ribs to the right geometry right here inside of my bucket and I'm going to need to do that twice we select that surface along with this surface so at this point now you can see that I have both of my ribs on my model and you can see that they're attached to that but I can move them sideways and I can move them up and down so now I want to constrain them so I can't move them sideways and up and down so I'm going to create some strains but this time I'm going to create constraints in relation to my DWG underlay and notice that I can just select those surfaces that I want them to be connected to and line it right up with my DWG underlay so now if I look at my model I've constrained it from moving sideways but I can still move it up and down so now we're going to go ahead we're going to constrain it completely I'm going to go and I'm going to turn on that constraint tool again I'm going to line it up to the bottom of my DWG underlay geometry right there this one is this rib right here and now by using my DWG underlay I have them located exactly where I want them to be as you can see in that view and if I try to move my geometry it's completely constrained so it can't move anywhere now let's go ahead and note it and what I want to do is I'm going to open up that DWG underlay but notice that I can go right here I can say open up inside of AutoCAD and so it's going to open that up right here in my AutoCAD instance that I had open and what we're going to do is we're going to just quickly move these ribs over so I'll just move these over like 80 millimeters that way then I will move my other rib 80 millimeters this way I'm going to go ahead I'm going to save that and now again if I go back to my inventor assembler first of all if I go back to my inventor part where I have my DWG underlay inserted you'll notice that again it alerts us that we need to update our part so I'm going to update that and then when I go back to the assembly and I hit update but notice that my ribs now move and they are associated to that underlay and their location updates just as we expect it now I'm not going to go through that whole exercise again but I did want to show that an inventor 2018 instead of being required to bring it into another part as I mentioned right from my place command I can go here and I can say insert the DWG file I can go ahead and I can select it and I can bring it directly into my assembly without being required to put it into a part first so let's go back to our PowerPoint here and I just wanted to again reiterate what capabilities and functions are going to be available depending on which version of inventor that you're going to be using so with inventor 2016 that's when that project DWG geometry command was added in the sketch environment inside of inventor and so that will be available in you know 2016 through 2018 you'll also in 2016 be able to control the visibility of your layers you'll be able to reposition and move around your DWG so that you can you can line it up between your your part and your drawing itself you can also in an assembly create joint constraints and assemble command and you can reference that DWG geometry that you project and it's associative when you make changes to the DWG back to your model inside of inventor so that's all part of inventor 2016 now with 2017 they added the capabilities that you saw with the drawings inside of inventor where you can actually include DWG underlay information in your drawing views that's also where they added the ability to crop the DWG underlays where you can focus on just a portion that you want for the specific instance that you've placed in your part or your assembly they also have associative placement so if in a model my my origin point that I put it in if that changes around based on geometry changes I make it'll actually move your DWG underlay around along with the model changes it also came up with an easy way to redefine the DWG placement so 2016 if you want to change it you might have to delete it and replace it whereas in 2017 I can hit the redefine command and pick a new plane and a new insertion point and then they added that nice right-click menu where you can add a new instance they added that little shortcut inside of inventor 2017 as well now talking about the capabilities in inventor 2018 this is now where you can insert DWG files directly into assemblies you know the method I showed you works in 2016 - 2017 where you put it in a part and then you use the DWG underlay in that part to control information at the assembly level also in 2018 they gave you the ability to insert multiple DWG underlays and by that I'm not talking about multiple instances I'm talking about if I have three different actual AutoCAD DWG drawings that I want to put in a part or an assembly I can now do that in 2018 in 2017 or 2016 you can only have one DWG drawing that you use as your your underlay but now in 2018 I can I can insert multiple copies or multiple drawings we also have that nice little open and AutoCAD shortcut that I showed you at the very end that was added at 2018 and Autodesk added support for the auto project options in your your application options where it can automatically project DWG information into your sketches so just a quick summary of you know what we what we reviewed and went over in today's presentation and demonstration we showed how you can use and you can take advantage of all that rich DWG auto cad information that you have and you can bring that information in to inventor parts and assemblies we showed how you have control over where your DWG is located what layers are visible cropping there's a lot of information that you can control we looked at how you use the DWG project command inside of the sketch environment to quickly convert the DWG underlay information into sketch entities that inventor can use and then we showed you how that's associative so when we make changes to our DWG file that automatically gets updated inside of our inventor file and passes through although again if you want you can break that link if you prefer and then finally we showed how in the context of an assembly we can use DWG underlays to create constraints to create joints and to see how you can use them as kind of a skeleton to control placements of components inside of your assembly so that concludes our presentation today like I said it's a very exciting technology if you guys are using AutoCAD or you have a lot of AutoCAD data this opens up some new potential workflows that may help you to become more efficient in the way that you create and the way that you generate designs so with that said I will turn the time back over to Nigel and again I appreciate you guys taking time to be with me on my presentation today certainly and thanks Nathan for that we do have some questions here let me go ahead and go through a couple of them um there was a question about adding ewg information to IE WS which we did show I just want to clarify Nathan when you brought over that layer information from AutoCAD into the the IDW environment so be dimensioning and the symbols as well um that all of that information just to clarify anything correct me if I'm wrong all of that is coming from AutoCAD you can't necessarily go in inventor and edit any of those dimensions or add any special symbols you want to and thinking x tiles and stuff are coming directly from AutoCAD is that correct that that's correct so if you wanted to make any changes to how that looks on a drawing you would actually make those changes in AutoCAD and then they would be updated inside of inventor so I don't want you to think you can't make changes to them you definitely can but you are correct that you would do that in AutoCAD and then that would then that would get pushed back through to the inventor drawing certainly certainly and then another question here relating to the using the measure tool to set the drill hole size on those parts when you went over that block there when using that measure tool Nathan do you know whether or not that measure tool stays dynamic in regards to any edits in the hole or in the sketch size or if that's static to that one time you measured yeah and that's a great question it is it is actually static to that one measurement that I use so for example if I change those hole size of my AutoCAD drawing those would not update dynamically if I wanted them to update with my DWG file then I would probably want to take an approach instead of using the hole tool where I create it as an extrude so if I created it as an extrude then any changes to the hole size inside of AutoCAD would associatively updates oh that's a great question certainly yes so just to clarify for those who didn't catch that instead of using the hole command just use the extrude tool and sketch I'm assuming the outside diameter Nathan and then that sketch with the outside diameter will main will remain associative to any changes you make on the AutoCAD end of things right yeah all right we're getting a bunch of thanks and awesome presentations those aren't questions but just want to let you donate them that people are definitely happy know officially that like I said I love this functionality I think it's awesome you know it seems like every company has DWG data lying around or they have customers that supply DWG data to them and you know what other questions always well what do I do with it because I use inventor I don't use AutoCAD that much or maybe they do use AutoCAD and so this gives you a fantastic easy way to take that geometry and start using it right away inside of inventor certainly and hopefully this convinces some of those people who are still on maybe 2015 and 2014 to start moving forward I'm to get functionality like this and if any of these functionalities seem kind of similar to what we did last week it is because it is using the same ECAD technology even though it's called DWG underlay in this case to bring in that information from AutoCAD into inventor similarly as it is to bring things like cell works from step files into embedder i'll came out the same time Jerry I'm asking about how to get the slides um we won't be able to temas eyes to you if anything this is all being recorded and put on our YouTube channel so you can look there later to see exactly what you need but if you do need two slides let us know in the survey afterwards and we can get that sent over to you via email and this is coming question from Cory if you move a view in your AutoCAD file will it model incorrectly when you update the underlay in Inventor so again remember that when we are placing it where we're placing it in conjunction with the so like when I place it in my in my inventor part file first when I pick that insertion point it's basically taking the AutoCAD zero zero world coordinate and it's placing that with wherever I put my insertion point and that's why I typically always had to move my auto cad model by changing the location of that that that point when I use that locate tool so as long as you relate it to the geometry and AutoCAD then you shouldn't have a problem after you move it in AutoCAD but even if it does move it at worst case it's very easy to go in and just quickly update that that location inside of inventor so either way it's not that big of a deal to get it back in sync with where you want it inside of inventor certainly certainly um another question can you do a DWG underlay with the 3d AutoCAD model you know what I haven't tested that out so I would I wouldn't be able to answer that at this point but that's definitely something that we can look at and and maybe get back to you on certainly I don't think it comes in three dimensions um yeah I mean I know when exceeded other tools where when you insert AutoCAD geometry as 3d it does kind of show the outline of your 3d geometry but I'm not sure the project command I'm not sure if it recognizes you know 3d edges and different entities like that so that's something that would have to explore and then potentially get back to you on but my gut feeling is that it's really made more for 2d geometry in AutoCAD yeah and I agree with the same sentiment there um I think that if you did just need AutoCAD 3d areas you had a 3d AutoCAD solid you wanted to bring that into inventor there's other workflows to do things like that not necessarily to you that underlay technology most of the times I think you'll just generate a 3d file out of AutoCAD I'm going to bring that dumb solid into inventor does that makes it that do you agree in that sense Maydan yeah that's true all right cool and then another question can you select a dimensions in the underlay to run your extrudes holes and modeling features um I think that could be answered by the layers turning on and off just correct me if I'm wrong here Corey um I don't think you can turn certain objects off in layers you can just turn the entire layer on and off so you can also just alter that not OK on the AutoCAD side of things but I don't think you can select certain objects in certain layers to turn on and off that correct Nathan that is correct it's it's the whole layer or none of it it's it's either/or you can't select independent entities like a dimension and right-click it to hide this or anything like that right people are asking where can I get recorded videos for this presentation there are being this is being recorded right now so like I say every week hi mom if you're watching this later and it's going to be on our YouTube channel this afternoon probably that's Qatar youtube-dot-com forward-slash cube technologies or if you just search achates ABA it on YouTube you'll be able to find an entire playlist of maybe are like 85 or so videos at this point does adding or removing layers in AutoCAD translate to the underlay yes again as long as you don't break that associative link any changes you make to that autocad drawing will pass through to the inventor site as well right and they've been said you can break that link so if you right-click the underlay similarly to any links you create with imported geometry you can suppress the link or you can break it entirely and it should work that way and question is how does this work with vaults does they grab the AutoCAD DWG as well and check that in or how does that process work Nathan yes it does grab you know it knows that it has that dependency and so it does become a dependency just like any you know other external file would become a dependency and it should pick that up and bring that in I haven't tested it a hundred percent Jonathan I know you're on have you tested that by chance yes I have yeah so it will actually grab that that drawing and pull it in with your check in so it looks at it as a children or a child item of the of the part itself yeah and by the way I had Jonathan the phone he's another one of our technical specialist here at Katif and he's worked with this extensively as well so I had him join us to help with any questions in case something like that came up certainly certainly and there are some people asking about that workflow to go from 3d AutoCAD into inventor Nathan or Jonathan do you want to elaborate a little bit on what it would take to get a 3d model from autocad into inventor whether it's a dumb solid or exactly what you get out of it so DWG underlay is strictly 2d elements so auto cad 2d elements it does not work currently with you know 3d models if you were to project right inside the AutoCAD there's a number of tools that can get a flat shot of a 3d model in 2d geometry that would work as an underlay certainly certainly thanks John are there other ways Jonathan that you can get 3d models and I know a factory design suite you know it will bring in some 3d information so it sounds like someone's asking they have 3d geometry and AutoCAD and they want that inside of inventor I you know you can always export AutoCAD into standard formats like I just that's probably the best way at this point yeah I just your steps is probably the best way to carry things over and then import them dotto can obviously have no design and art into inventor you'll have no design intent so you won't see similarly to bring like Saltworks files into embed and you'll get the same kind of information it will just be a brick solid a dumb solid per se but at least you'll get that geometry and if you needed like that representation in your inventor model for some reason and Raju from Benson hey how's it going mentions that hey it does work really great involved they use it all the time that's that's good to hear for sure that people are definitely leveraging this technology to either merge the two world of 2d and 3d you don't necessarily have to choose one or the other or to use some of that old 2d legacy data to be able to generate 3d geometry on some of this older stuff that maybe you're not editing anymore maybe it's a part that you've been using for the last 15 years that you originally started in you know say are 12 AutoCAD we just need to make a 3d representation and you can do that in this way so Jonathan or Nathan just this is a question that I have um you know this works with any of the special objects in any of the AutoCAD verticals so things like special civil 3d objects or things like point clouds and stuff yeah so since they're all based on you know an AutoCAD platform as long as that is a AutoCAD object right as a if you can select those objects and manipulate them the same way that you would any other you know sketch object line objects things like that blocks right all those elements can be used as a underlay but they all have to be 2d elements okay make sense cool so I think that's everything for questions if anyone thinks of anything else feel free to shoot us an email a question to keep calm or give us a call and I will definitely be able to answer those for you again like I mentioned this recordings going to be available on our youtube channel that's youtube.com slash Katti technologies that should be up later this afternoon if you need to catch up or maybe you missed a bit of the presentation so you can watch it over again so yeah with that I'd like to thank Nathan and like to thank Jonathan Creek for being on this morning it is definitely a great resource that we have here for you to both be on our webcast this morning all right thank you everyone yep and just to let you all know on next week we're going to be doing a bulb security a VA we're going to be going over security features both on the user end um and on the file end so maybe if you are a new vault admin or just want a refresher on some of those tools and capabilities in regards to securities in vault Mike Carlson will be on with us next week going over a couple of those things so you know definitely join us next week same time same place ten o'clock on Thursday so with that I'll leave you all and we'll see y'all next time thank you you

Channel: KETIV Technologies

Views: 43,765

Keywords: akn_include, KETIV, KETIV Technologies Inc, AVA, KETIV AVA, KAVA, Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk, Inventor 2017, Autodesk Inventor 2017, New in Inventor 2017, Autodesk Inventor 2017 Professional, Inventor 2017 Professional, Inventor 2018, Autodesk Inventor 2018, AutoCAD, Autodesk autocad, Autocad 2017, Autocad DWG, DWG, DWG to 3d, DWG to inventor, 3D autocad, DWG Underlay, Dwg import, DWG Open, AnyCAD, 2d to 3d, senior technical tips, design efficiency, 2d drawing to 3d model

Id: v0YoXCjKMZE

Length: 47min 37sec (2857 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2017