Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

Hi all,

I'm running into a weird "redundant constraint" in a major sub-assembly of the suspensions we design here. I'm not sure if this is problematic, but we're working on ferreting out the root causes of our CAD models exploding/continuous edited out of turn errors (a big Vault issue) and I'm far from convinced the constraint solver is where we need it to be for our designs.

If someone can take a look at the attached and tell me:

A) Why do we get these redundancy errors? 

B) Could they cause inconsistent behavior as this sub-assembly is reused?

C) What concerns are there with Inventor (2012 for now) leaving degrees of freedom open to be defined in later assemblies?

Being that we design suspensions, and we're frequently doing layouts, clearance studies, packaging studies, swapping parts in and out, changing part profiles, and the where-used on parts is often in the 100's of instances we leave our sub-assemblies as loosely defined as possible to mimmick real life behavior. Even if we wanted to, positional representations fall far short of the sort of versatility we need out of our models.

I'd appreciate any help and advice I can get to get our CAD system to where we need it to be.

Thanks!

-Sam

[#2]

Are the parts as shown/causing the redundant constraint custom content center parts?

[#3]

No, these are all parts we've modeled and saved in our regular working folder. I have also gone through and ensured there are no open sketches or free constraints in any of the sub-assemblies as well. I've checked everything out, updated it, rebuilt it, rebuilt it again, and carefully saved it back in the Vault.

Basically as I'm going about building this assembly I am trying to baseline the softwares capability with our product. I'm trying to cross every t, dot every i, edit, and re-edit everything to prove out the software.

[#4]

(see Post 8 in this thread)

 http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Inventor/IS-INVENTOR-REALLY-USEFUL/m-p/1332811/highlight/true...

To really answer your question I think would require an on-site evaluation of your techniques.

[#5]

Post 8 is a good read for new hires, and I will certainly pass that along. I've certainly brought some of the same mindset to our company here when I joined 18 months ago. 

However, I've been designing suspensions since 2006, using SolidEdge and Solid Works both before Inventor. I've never had nearly the fits I have with Inventor on assemblies I've designed (or in this case audited) from scratch. Part of it is tying in with Autodesk Vault and locking all the files down. We end up with a lot of out of date assemblies we're working on resolving as sub-assemblies are updated and released (updating the assemblies at release is not realistic for our group).

There's something fundamentally different about the ShapeModeler constraint solver from ParaSolid, and I've been trying to find enough documentation on it to explain what it is. I've seen ShapeModeler literally try to break apart solid sub-assemblies to move them into position for a mate in a higher level assembly.

As I'm rebuilding CAD files in our library here, I'm instituing as many best practices as I can into the models and assemblies. However, I appreciate as many tips, tricks, best practice notes, etc. as I can get. Please keep passing them along.