Understanding and Managing Inventor Content Center: Part 1 | Autodesk Virtual Academy

good morning everyone uh welcome to autodesk virtual academy brought to you by your friends here at katie technologies i'm nigel bayek one of the customer success managers here at kativ um today i'm joined by one of our good friends and colleagues here javier chavez uh hi good morning good good how about yourself i'm doing okay i'm doing good excited for uh today's session uh this is something that is often requested by the user base and i feel like we just can't get enough of a content center we've gone over it a number of times we'll kind of review kind of some of the stuff that we've gone over before but it gets brought up so much that you know let's go ahead and review some of this let's go ahead and show some new things and that's why hob's here today to show you all um some more information about understanding and managing inventor content center why you should use it um the numerous ways you can store all of these files and ultimately how to get the most out of your inventory installation um is there anything else you have to ad-hoc before we get started uh you know what just the fact that yeah we have talked about it a number of times so i'm going to try to put a different spin on it but i also want to refer back um to you know previous aba sessions uh even talk about another session that's available to you guys it's a bit longer a bit more in-depth it's really really good um to give you guys all kinds of resources so again a different take hopefully you'll get something different out of it you know if you've watched some of the other ones uh that we've done or anything else out there and then you'll take all that information and hopefully you know put a best practice for you you know combining all those uh resources so uh without further ado have i'll uh i'll let you take it away all right sounds good um so with that said we're gonna get started just talking a little bit about the agenda right uh we're gonna give you guys a quick overview about what content center is how it works um you know we'll talk about some resources as well as i mentioned a little bit earlier uh but uh the meat of this will be in in the you know the lower half of this managing and modification uh customization of your of your uh content center right so it'll go into you know working with vault just a little bit because you know there's certain ways to manage your content center within vault and so we'll talk a little bit about that as well and we'll we'll give you guys a quick uh overview right so why do we want to use content center in the first place um if you saw the description of today's session uh you probably already got some of this information but the database that that content center database contains over three quarters of a million parts okay plus features okay so what people don't realize is the content center actually contains features as well that you could use in parts so if you need a certain type of a cutout a rectangular cutout you could probably just drag and drop it onto your part um very little known you know fact there in regards to that is that you actually have features if you need a hole you can drag and drop it there there's probably easy ways to create that so it doesn't get used that much but then another reason we use the content center is it's a quick way to find parts depending on how you launch it how you start to utilize it you can use keys to kind of filter out well look i need a socket head cap screw but i want to look for something with a certain diameter and then it'll filter out all the socket cap screws available within that diameter and then you go on to the next criteria or key which might be the length the shaft length or and then it might be the thread type right so it should allow you to quickly find parts okay and then i think one of my favorite things one of the best things i think in terms of using the contents that are advanced placement options okay simply using nuts and bolts gives you a a bolted connection tool that allows you to basically not just insert one bolt but insert the washers the all the fasteners that go with it including the hole if there's not an existing hole it'll actually drill one out for you right so we'll take a look at some of those we won't be able to take a look at all of them um but we'll take a a quick peek at some of those in just a moment all right and last but not least in my my little list here is changing the size or swapping out similar components is cake okay normally if you have to swap out one component for the other one bracket for another one motor for another your constraints will most likely break unless they were just you know generated from a very very similar part yeah um so uh with that said all right let's take a quick peek at this right look i'm gonna go and switch over to inventor and i'll bounce back and forth here uh but let's take a look at some of this so um jump in here to an existing assembly right and this contains a there's there's a bit of stuff going on here but this contains some tube and pipe components and we'll start by just maybe placing from content center now a couple things to note here is uh at the moment i'm using desktop content so we'll talk about that in just a moment but when i go to place i have the option to place from you know uh folder uh from vault uh in certain cases but here here's here's one way i could insert a content center component so i'll go and do that and uh this is where i start to maybe filter out what i need and if i'm looking at bolts or components here i could simply start drilling in here and looking at stuff i mentioned it was fairly quick to to um to get to there are search criterias here that that will help you whittle this down but you can see this is how we easily get to you know three quarters of a million parts there's tons of these just under this one category of hex headphones okay so there are filters here and you can say you know if you're using ansi right let's just show ansi and that's it right and that whittles it down quite a bit right and there's also a search window okay so uh there's advanced uh search here where you could say okay give it more criteria here and put it uh specified very specifically only look for hex head parts okay so we're already there there's already that criteria but then you could also put in you know something here uh like the display name or maybe the family description uh contains the word uh metric or imperial um or inch right so i'm gonna put inch here i'll add this to uh my search criteria and i can tell it to search now right so this will get me to hex volt inch very quickly or anything else that contains those words and i can certainly you know uh get to a point here where i add more criteria that uh quickly gets to what i need right so i'm not going to use this in this case i could see the hex bolt that i want to use here uh right away and it's just basically a really basic hex bolt okay so one of the things you'll be able to see here as i start to to use it is there's a table attached to this so we'll talk about this table uh and if i turn it off it goes away but when i turn on the table you'll see that this basically is every instance of that bolt uh all the various sizes configurations you see that and so you have a quick preview as to what's available and you might even see in you know some of these libraries that yes i use you know ansi hex bolt uh in uh imperial units but they don't have the size i use you know there's uh this goes up to four inches i believe um yeah four inches and if you need something bigger it might be in a different library like heavy duty hex head bolt but still you might find other libraries that are missing information or maybe missing a size you simply add to this table okay so we'll do that in just a little bit but um let's try this here okay so hex bolt uh there is a here that you want to be aware of it's called auto drop and the auto drop tool uh does that it specifically it automatically drops in the right size okay it's on it's not available in every single thing but these are the advanced placement options i was talking about so i'll double click here and i'll zoom in and you can see for this hole um this uh default fastener is not the right size so if you sit on this for just a a second here it'll go and find the right size based off of that nominal diameter so again you sit on that um that arc or circle it reads the nominal diameter and says hey that's uh you probably need a half inch uh fastener right so you could just place it out in space and just click and then you know add constraints but again some of these advanced placement options make it really easy to just click right and it's already constrained there is a insert constraint already added in there so here's the auto drop options if you had turned that off you wouldn't get some of these options uh but it says follow pattern that's interesting so if there is or you know the holes were made in a in uh using a pattern uh it should follow through and recognize pattern and match the pattern um so there's an option insert multiple there's uh ways to manually change the size there's the bolted connection so this tool exists in our design accelerators and it's another way to access the same functionality uh however i think instead of you know showing it you know to you up here i'm just going to do it right here all right so i'll go ahead and apply this right i do have an option here of the the thread type it does not read that if if it's in there and uh let me let me try this again just because i meant to use the design accelerator okay we'll let it read that okay and i'll click on this button instead of just applying it right and get into the design accelerator okay so this is the design accelerator the bolted connection design accelerator it exists on this tab uh right here and you have a bolted connection tool that's the other way to launch this exact same thing and there's just like there is you know four or five different ways to create a hole it's very similar except it's going to basically you know put in the whole bolted connection okay so i don't want to just leave it at the bolt um you define maybe with this one a start plane which has already been selected here just by me picking on this a circular reference so that's the circular reference there that are red and you know made out to be half inch and then a termination well this has got to go through this plate and maybe the bottom and i think if you see the bottom uh of this it's just a like a sheet metal bracket or something and there is no hole there okay so if i tell it hey go ahead and terminate here it'll add a hole okay so it's actually going to modify the part for me it's going to add a hole now uh if this is all i need then i'm done but i actually need more i need washers underneath this i need um on top and on bottom i guess um and i also need a a nut to hold it right so when we look at this dialog box right these are some of the advanced placements there's a double line here just underneath my red line and this represents the top of the connection this represents the bottom part of the connection underneath the plate okay so anything i add above the line goes on the top side anything i have below the line goes on the bottom side so a bit more advanced right um so let's go ahead and click add fastener between the hole and the head of the bolt i need a washer so it's looking at the content center and it's filtering out to just washers right but it is using the content center again it's going to that library so i'll just use a plain washer here you can see it added in it might extend the length of the bolt or you could manually drag it here to do that as well okay so i need fasteners underneath i'll click underneath the double line i'll add another simple plain washer okay and then enough to go underneath that so underneath the washer i'll click to add a fastener and i'll put a simple hex nut here right and in this case since i started messing with this it didn't quite extend the bolt but you can see when i do this it's using standard base components so you know i'm going to use something that is not you know out of whack with standards and i'm not you know creating something that's unique or custom okay so i'm going to go ahead and lengthen it here i'm also going to tell it to follow the pattern okay so you can see here i'm getting four volts for the price of four bolted connections for the price of one those are some of the advanced placement options i'm talking about okay so um in addition just so you know i mean it new features inside of inventor allow you to place these in directly in the assembly instead of creating a sub assembly so that's a new feature uh if you guys are interested in some of the new features and going over them in 2021 um you have the option again of keeping you know a a sub-assembly with all this component these components or breaking them out like we did here as individual components attached directly uh directly to the assembly so that's new i'll i'll make a reference for uh for you guys to look at okay and then if i wanted to change sizes uh it'd be pretty easy i mean you can right click on some of these components and um change the size immediately here right or maybe change the thread type or something and it'll just go back to the uh it'll just go back to uh being constrained exactly where it is because it comes from the same family so swapping these out is is easy and there's an option to replace all the advantage of having maybe a sub assembly is you can replace all of these things all at once so i'll go and cancel out of this and let's get back to the presentation portion of things here okay all right so um let's go and take a look here right so why use it you know we can remove um or why customize it we can remove unnecessary content you see i'd have filter you know to ansi well i don't use iso i don't use din i don't use japanese international standards so i can easily customize the content center and filter that stuff out and even within a family of nuts or bolts or piping or whatever there could be sizes i don't want users to reference right to put in because we just don't use them or maybe a wall thickness on a pipe that we just don't use so if you want to eliminate those type of mistakes you can filter out the things that you don't want your users to use this is kind of a cad admin thing right um and you want to document this uh whatever you do to the content center uh keep you know backup copies of some of your source files do all that good stuff but these are the basic uh reasons right starting with this removing unnecessary content right so you might want to customize the properties so these you know the guys at autodesk have no idea where you buy your parts from or what your internal part numbers are so they use a generic one this is the most common request we get in terms of customizing the content center and so you're going to want to customize those properties like part numbers maybe file names or maybe materials okay and performance is another one okay so if there's less stuff to for the content center to sift through when you're launching it it's gonna perform better right now this isn't as big an issue now as it was in the past um initially when this first came out but i still see a significant improvement in performance when i have just instead of three you know three quarters of a million prices to sift through i just have maybe ten thousand right that's a drastic difference so all right so some resources for you guys we mentioned the fact that you know this is um something we've talked about a number of times i don't want to repeat a lot of what we've said instead i want to add on and build on to um these other sessions so uh nigel is gonna put some links on the uh in the chat to share with you guys if you guys can you know maybe uh copy them and paste them somewhere or bookmark them but this is one of them okay and it's the inventor 2016 content center part one part two uh it's 2016 it's older but it is good okay uh there's two parts to that so take a look at that again copy and paste them somewhere uh bookmark them and then there's another one again on our aba sessions how to customize your inventory content center that was done by cameron he goes very very in depth on custom customizing the database i'm not going to go as in depth i don't think i need to i'm going to talk a little bit more about managing them uh in just a moment but um really really good session all together all these resources should help you build the best content center you could possibly build right the most efficient way to do this for your organization so the other thing um the other resource i looked at are productivity training sessions right so i looked through there and again cameron did one of these not that long ago that gets really really in-depth um you know more than the you know 45 minutes or so that we spend here at aba uh this is probably a good two to three hours i don't remember exactly what the length is on content center okay uh so another link there um take a look at those in the chat copy and paste them these are really really good resources okay so with that said let's move on and talk about how the content center works right so these parts every single part that's in the content center and there's only parts there's no assemblies unfortunately it doesn't support assemblies uh but these all get generated from an ipart so if you're if you're familiar with iparts that's how these all got generated from originally you know somebody at autodesk basically is going to go through the same process that we're going to go through and we customize our parts to generate all those goals they're very disciplined about it they've got you know tons of parameters that may or may not be useful to you uh but that really help you control that component okay so the way it works is uh you know when you're working with ipart that there's a table there and it generates a family table in the content center database when you publish it there okay so you just have to get it there okay and in the uh the ipart model that this starts off with creates what's called a family template okay so there you know for every family that you see components like a nut or bolt there is one part that gets used and what happens is when you actually choose a part in the content center like i did a second ago a nut or with a pipe a an o-ring okay it takes the parameters in the table quickly applies them to the family template file right and sort of does a save as and generates a new file in the content center folder right or a custom folder you always have the option when you're doing this to you know just throw it in a standards folder where it becomes read-only you can't change them or in a custom location where you can give it its own name uh put it anywhere you want and you have re uh write access to it uh so again it's it's normally read only in a cop a content center folder or in a custom folder it becomes read write and you could do a lot of stuff with that uh after the fact unfortunately a lot of people have standard components and the only thing they they they have to work with uh to generate like custom part numbers within that part is they create their own library in a custom folder and they have to remember if i've already generated a half inch by two inch bolt with you know coarse threads they have to go and remember to go back to the library first see if somebody's already created one and if not then they have to generate it's just it just becomes a mess okay so this is again one of those reasons that justify is why we might want to manage and create our own custom content center library okay so um with that said let's go and continue here right let's talk about how we're going to manage these files okay there's lots of stuff to manage here i mean you got several different types of components and um you know on top of that you're gonna need to make a decision on whether you're gonna use desktop content or vault-based content so desktop content i don't think there's a lot of you guys out there that will be using it it'd be interesting in the chat if you guys can kind of let us know you know if you guys are using desktop content versus vault based but desktop is meant to be used typically for a single user it's just you okay that content center resides the like the database resides on your own computer okay there's no or very little restrictions on who can make changes to that content and it's less secure now there's ways to share the desktop content with other users and put that desktop content somewhere on a shared folder right copy the libraries and share it with everybody and you'll be able to create your own custom content center library but anybody will be able to browse out to that folder and make changes uh maybe some unwanted changes it's less secure okay so if it's vault-based it's much better you have to have very special permissions to be able to edit those files okay um so um we also want to filter out you know unused libraries uh or information uh within those within those uh libraries right or within the content center so there's filtering the unused libraries later on we'll talk about you know creating custom libraries and filtering you know information out of that but just getting rid of stuff you don't use that's there's a big plus to that okay we do this through the ipj or project file okay and then uh at some point in managing these you're going to probably need to create your own custom library now this is something a new take on this that you may or may not have heard of but i recommend creating a production uh content center library and a test library okay so you do want to sort of isolate you know uh what you're doing sort of experiment with it and then you know make your modifications in that test library okay so make modifications customize in your test library and uh we can set this up in such a way that users typically your typical user just does not see your test library they only see production right and so when you're ready and you've tested it out you've edited out this information you can copy or move i should say that family of parts into your production library okay last but not least have a backup plan so whether you're using desktop content um you know find a way to back up your custom libraries okay um if it's on vault those custom libraries automatically get backed up uh when your vault gets backed up so uh super important this becomes you know um information that's unique to your organization i can always restore the default libraries that come with autodesk they're out there on the web you can just download them again if you lose them i cannot restore your custom libraries unless you back them up so come up with some kind of backup plan if it's desktop you know have your it maybe back up a folder or something like that uh but if it's uh vault-based make sure you have a vault backup okay so let's take a quick peek again inside of inventor and see about some of these things that we need to manage right so um i'm going to get out of this file for just a second okay and i'll keep this information here all right and uh that dialogue by by the way i just kind of clicked through it it shows you in 2021 why we're saving right because there's new parts or because we're upgrading uh to the latest format of embedder or there's api changes i skipped through it really quick but again another new feature right so first things first i'm going to go to tools and this is an application option i'm going to go to tools application options and um there is a spec special content center tab here okay and it lets me know hey me as a user i'm using desktop content so even if i wanted to use a vault-based content center i'm not you as a you know somebody who's managing this needs to go out to every machine and make sure they're using the right option here okay so while i'm at it right i'll go here uh to this location i'll show you just something about these libraries right i'm gonna go ahead and bring up a new windows explorer window there we go and i'll uh i'll go there right so these are the libraries that come with the software if you simply copy these to an f drive a g drive a map drive that everybody has access to you can point users to these okay and if you want to do some kind of security like there's a custom library here called my library uh you could uh start to work with windows security and you know add permissions but now you're getting into it's uh kind of role here and it becomes a little bit more difficult you really have to know who these users are how to get to them you might not even have permission to do that um on the shared network drive so it becomes a little bit harder okay so these are the libraries uh you know they're they're less restricted um and i'm going to go ahead and tell it hey we're going to start using the default server version of the content center okay and some of those videos outlined you know hey you have to go download these and get these installed but once they're there they're there so okay i'm now using content center okay now the other part of this is in this project file and i'll uh i'll take a quick peek at this project file here i'm going to go to projects okay and i'm using a vault project it's yeah i currently have it checked out so that i can make changes to it but i am using a vault project here and uh when i click to the right when i'm set to this um it'll ask me to log in and that's another thing right administrators have access to edit the content center files um to end it you know create new libraries things like that you could give users just a regular user the ability to create new content center files or content center libraries or edit the library without giving them full admin access so there is a specific role you can add to them for that so i'm going to go ahead and log in i'm going to be able to do some of the things i need to do but regardless of whether you're using desktop or the vault content center the only difference is one asks you to log in and verify your credentials the other one does not okay so we start to see that when i'm using this bac mono project right these are the libraries i can use okay i've already filtered out these russian standards these idf ones this japanese internet national standards um and so if i want to hide some of these because it just i just want to remove clutter i can remove iso if i don't use mold uh parts there are mold standard mold components here for for plastic injection molding right i don't want to use those i can start to remove that and they'll see less right keep in mind this is the project that all my users use as well so i'll check it back in at some point and i'll make sure that um that they uh only see what i want them to see okay so ideally i think it would be kind of cool if we could have just our library and our library only right but uh that may or may not make sense for you so let's start first by by uh just taking a look here and see what's happening so it does tell me what server i'm logged into um it shows me if for some reason a library is missing it shows up in red you can see my library is missing so let's not even you know go there and show that okay so i filtered some of these out uh i'm going to log into the vault server and create a new library so i'm going to choose well i've already uh i guess save some of those settings no it's asking me to save so let's go and save those all right but i'm remoted into uh the server and again uh now on the console you have to do this once and create your own libraries i'm going to create two of these okay so on the left hand side if i expand libraries here here's my libraries i'm going to right click and create a brand new library okay so all these have yellow locks on them the read write uh or read only sorry uh read only but i'm going to put a name here and i'm going to call this my cative production all right i'll click ok it'll create that and then i'm going to create a pre getting test library so i wish you could create two at the same time you can so we'll give it uh just a second and there it is it's it's done ready to go there we go we'll also create a fatigue uh sorry conceive test library all right so when this is done i'm going to come back to um my machine right that represents a user's machine and let's go and filter this out a little bit more okay so for production remember this is my production project um i might filter out everything here right and just use um my one production library okay they'll see a whole lot less components when they work with this so i might take off all these standard stuff here right and create my own version of everything because i think with almost all of this stuff i want my own part numbers so this is my production project okay and i'll go and save this okay now what we'll want to do is create another project for cad admins okay one that the users can't see and if i come back to uh vault here for just a second i'm going to go and log in and there's my server name there okay all right i'm gonna browse to where my project file is and you can see this is the one that users use right so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to where that's located and i'm just going to make a copy of it i could do a save as there's a way to do that i'm just going to make a copy of it here okay and this is one that i'm gonna want to hide from other users okay so maybe i'll call it uh bac you know content center editing okay and there it is i have this this other you know project just for that so uh with that said i'm going to go ahead and browse and open that okay and for this you know this is the one for the cad admin we're going to add anything we could possibly use including you know our teeth test right so i know i'm going to be dealing with antsy uh maybe some din here uh the routed systems or the tubing pipes and sheet metal components um and and these are some of the ones that you know we could possibly copy and use so i'm going to leave it at that all right just these okay i don't use mold stuff ever i don't use iso but i might copy some of these other ones so it's filtered even for me right there we go and i'll go and save those changes and so i have this base this editing project file here that's going to let me you know now customize the way i need to okay so i'm not going to get to the customization part of it just yet i want to come back to my presentation and you know talk about a few things but that's what's on the order next so you

Channel: KETIV Technologies

Views: 3,271

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: autodesk, akn_include, autodesk content center, autodesk inventor, help with content center, content center in autodesk, ketiv ava, inventor content center, autodesk virtual academy, autodesk inventor (software), ketiv academy, ketiv autodesk academy, autodesk academy, ava academy, autodesk software, ketiv technologies, autodesk inventor 2016, ketiv technologies inc, software (industry), inventor pro, technology (industry), inventor content center add part

Id: wue96b6pEyg

Length: 35min 38sec (2138 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020