Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

I am trying to find the interior volume of an assembly (when am I not?!?!) by subtracting the assembly from a block that surrounds the most of it.  Somewhere the assembly has a "leak" and I have been trying to use the Cross Section Analysis to track down where the inside lump is connected to the outside lump to be subtracted.  Is there a less time consuming way to dynamically drag a plane across and get cross sectional views?

Even better is there a simple way to animate the analysis plane moving across the block so I can hopefully just watch and pause it when I find a leak?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

The old way of doing this might work for you: instead of moving the analysis plane, choose a fixed plane, such as one of the origin planes, and move the assembly.  Unground your assembly, and constrain it so that it has only one degree of motion, in the direction you want.  Then you can drag it back and forth through the section plane.  You could also set up a constraint that can be driven to animate the dynamic section.

[#3]

That should work- I thought you could do this more easily in previous versions.  I'm not too terribly familiar with the animating but in this case I think I really need to use it.  It becomes rather tedious trying to find the connection having to travel through ten feet of slices a couple of mm at a time!