Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

Sorry for all the posts today, it's been one of those days....

I have a new user (an ex-SW guy) who's coming to me about all types of things he wants to see or do in Inventor and they are things I just haven't really had a need or a concern about doing, but some thing he's asking for seem pretty basic and I figure Inventor would have a means of doing, but I'm drawing blanks and searching hasn't found any answers.

The latest one: If he has an assembly, how can he tell if parts are contrained or not? Ideally he'd like to have some sort of icon or highlight, glyph or whatever in the browser tree that easily signifies what parts are contrained and what parts are not. To a point I'd have to agree, that would be a nice little thing to have, especially when you may have hundreds or even thousands of parts/subassemblies.

Short of expanding each part to see if any constraints have been added or selecting the parts and "moving" them, is there a way to quickly note those parts in anassembly in Inventor 2012?

Please say there is or I'll never hear the never ending "Solidworks can do it".

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi CelticDesignServices, 

In an assembly go to the View tab > Visibility panel > Degrees of Freedom button.

And also:

Assemble tab > Productivity panel > Degree of Freedom Analysis button.

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[#3]

I'm still on 2010, so disregard this if something better has come along since then.

On the Assemble tab, Productivity panel, check out the Degree of Freedom Analysis.  Anything in the list with a nonzero number of degrees of freedom is at least partially unconstrained.