Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

GDay All,

I have been playing with appearances and no matter what I do I cannot get any knurled pattern to appear on my parts.

The knurl pattern and settings appear perfectly fine in the appearance editor but when I apply it to a part all I see is a chrome effect, no pattern.

I have tried using many differnet .bmp's, templates, importing from 2012 pro etc... all with the same results.

Anyone know why I am not seeing the knurl?

I am running Inventor 2013 Pro on

Win 7 64bit

Intel i7 960

Asus Sabertooth x58

Asus ATI HD 6970 graphics card

1x Patriot Pyro 120g SSD

6x Hard drives - 8.5 TB total

Corsair CMP12GX3M3A1600C9 - 12 gig Ram.

[#2]

Go to the View tab.  On the appearance panel>Visual Style, select the drop-down and change this to "Realistic".  If its still not there, look on the right side of the appearance panel and change the textures to "ON".

Kirk

[#3]

I tried as you suggested, turning on realistic and frankly, that didn't really work for me. It certainly would not be of any use in day to day usage either. Ray tracing takes an inordinate amount of time when set to best.

With ray tracing set to interactive the results are marginal. I can kind of see a pattern but it's anything but impressive.

When set to good the result is not much better and when set to best there is no sign of the knurl?

The project I tried has 14 parts, 3 of which have knurled details. It took 42 sec to render the ray tracing and any zooming or rotating causes the ray tracing to repeat.

I zoomed in to get a better look at the knurl details, it took considerably longer to render and still no knurl detail.

See the attached pic.

Pic 1. The chrome knob in the center of the pic, the small knob above and to the right and the knob to the right of that are supposed to be knurled. This image was captured after ray tracing using the best option. Realistic was selected in the view panel. I was using knurled 45 (the default knurl setting in 2013 in these pics)

Pic 2. The same shot taken with 'Shaded with edges' selected in the view panel. No knurling.

Also, you can't open parts correctly with realistic turned on, it just doesn't work.

[#4]

Tools > Application Options, Hardare Tab.  Click the Diagnostics button and paste the screen shot here. Not familiar with your graphics card. That may be the issue.

[#5]

As requested, here are the details, see the pic also;

This Direct3D graphics driver is Microsoft WHQL certified
Graphics Hardware Description:
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. ATI display adapter (0x6718)

AIRViz Device Manager \ VirtualDeviceDx11
Feature Level 5_0
Quality Mode
Hardware Renderer

Graphics driver file aticfx64.dll,aticfx64.dll,aticfx64.dll,aticfx32,aticfx32,aticfx32,atiumd64.dll,atidxx64.dll,atidxx64.dll,atiumdag,atidxx32,atidxx32,atiumdva,atiumd6a.cap,atitmm64.dll is version 8.950.0.0
Current optimization settings are not known
The display is using 32-bit color


Inventor Version:

Build: 138, Release: 2013 RTM - Date: Thu 03/01/2012       
64-Bit Edition - 8192.00 GB


System Information:

Operating System:         64-bit Microsoft Windows 7 Professional  (Build 7601) Service Pack 1
Language:             English
System Manufacturer:         System manufacturer
System Model:             System Product Name
BIOS:                 BIOS Date: 08/02/11 14:36:59 Ver: 08.00.15
Processor:             Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU         960  @ 3.20GHz (1 processor, 4 cores, Hyperthreading enabled)
System Memory:             11.991 GB RAM


Graphics Device Information:

Renderer:             HAL
Manufacturer:             Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Chip Type:             ATI display adapter (0x6718)
DAC Type:             Internal DAC(400MHz)
Graphics HW Memory:         1.979 GB
Display Mode:             1680 x 1050 (32 bit) (60 Hz)

Graphics driver file:         aticfx64.dll,aticfx64.dll,aticfx64.dll,aticfx32,aticfx32,aticfx32,atiumd64.dll,atidxx64.dll,atidxx64.dll,atiumdag,atidxx32,atidxx32,atiumdva,atiumd6a.cap,atitmm64.dll
Driver file version:         8.950.0.0
Driver Date:             14 February 2012 0:00:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)


Direct3D Graphics Device Information:

Adapter Description:         AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series
Vendor ID string:         0x00001002
Device ID string:         0x00006718
VendorID:             1002
DeviceID:             6718
SubSystemID:             3b81043
Revision:             0


Direct3D 10 / DXGI System Information:

Dedicated Video Memory:     1.979 GB
Dedicated System Memory:     0 MB
Shared System Memory:         5.746 GB


DxDiag System Information:

Operating System:         Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1 (7601.win7sp1_gdr.111118-2330)
Language:             English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer:         System manufacturer
System Model:             System Product Name
BIOS:                 BIOS Date: 08/02/11 14:36:59 Ver: 08.00.15
Processor:             Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU         960  @ 3.20GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.2GHz
System Memory:             12288MB RAM
Page File:             5549MB used, 19006MB available
DirectX Version:         DirectX 11
DxDiag Version:         6.01.7601.17514


DxDiag Graphics Device Information:

DirectX Version:         10.0
DDI Version:             11
DDI Version Number:         b
DxDiag WHQL Level:         0
Driver Signed Valid:         True
Driver Signed:             True
Manufacturer:             Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Chip Type:             ATI display adapter (0x6718)
DAC Type:             Internal DAC(400MHz)
Revision:             
Graphics HW Memory:         3814 MB
Display Mode:             1680 x 1050 (32 bit) (60Hz)

Graphics driver file:         aticfx64.dll,aticfx64.dll,aticfx64.dll,aticfx32,aticfx32,aticfx32,atiumd64.dll,atidxx64.dll,atidxx64.dll,atiumdag,atidxx32,atidxx32,atiumdva,atiumd6a.cap,atitmm64.dll
Driver file version:         8.17.0010.1119
Driver Date:             2/15/2012 13:17:04
WHQL Level:             1


Inventor Options Information:

Options = 0x00000000
Warning Options = 0x00000000


Graphics driver log information:

[#6]

Andy,

There's some updated info in the wiki help relating to migration of materials - perhaps that will cover your issues with knurl not appearing:

http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/Inventor/enu/2013/Help/0000-Installa0/0192-Data_Mig192/0193-Data_Mig193...

If you need to use the Realistic view mode but don't want the performance hit from  Ray Tracing then the best solution is to switch it off:

Tools, App Options, Display, Settings - Uncheck "Use Ray Tracing for Realistic Style"

Hope this helps,

Thanks,
Chris

[#7]

Thanks Chris, I tried that and it helped, but I found that the knurl issue is what I believe to be a scaling error in Inventor 2013.

I drew an extruded cylinder 200mm (8 in) diameter and applied the knurl to one face. It rendered the knurl quite large on that part. If you think about what a knurl would look like on an 8 inch cylinder, it would appear quite small, not so in Inventor 2013. See pic Large Part.

The same knurl appearance was applied to a 10mm (3/8 in) part and the knurl on that part should look fairly large but we don't see any knurl at all. See pic Small Part.

So there is obviously an error in there somewhere.

[#8]

Andy,

On the new Appearance Editor, (bottom left), there is a setting for Display Units (see attached image). What do you have that set to ? Does it correspond to the units of the knurled parts ?

Feel free to post your ipt file & we'll take a look.

Thanks,
Chris

[#9]

Chris, it was set to English (in, lbmass, psi) so I went ahead and changed it to Metric mmNs (mm, N, MPa) but it made no difference.

I added the thumbscrew (the small part) to this post. This is not the only part I have seen this on though.

Thanks BTW, I appreciate any help and advise I can get

[#10]

Hi Andy,

The issue is that for your knurled appearance the scale of the bitmap file being used is many times larger than you need it. See "Knurl Appearance Scaling.png" & attached ipt file.

I changed the Knurl "Relief Pattern" to be "Custom - Image" & then changed the Scale to be 2.54mm (from 304.8mm), then saved the Appearance. I'm sure you can work out how I got from 304.8 to 2.54.....

After you've done this you can use the Appearance Adjust command from the Quick Access Toolbar, to dynamically change the scaling by dragging the glyphs after you've selected the surface. See "Knurl Appearance Adjust.png".

This issue is logged in our issue database.

Thanks,
Chris