Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

I mainly use this program to design photomasks for photolithography.  I am trying to create a 0.5cm X 0.5cm area of 10 micron circles that are 20 microns apart.  A graduate student in my lab showed me how to make patterns by using the rectangular pattern button after drawing one circle.  I did that, and had it do the 30 micron spacing and 250 circles in each the horizontal and vertical direction.. However, this results in the program freezing every single time I try to do it and even if it didn't freeze it would take days to finish because that is about 27,500 circles total.  I have seen other people do similar things and have heard that is should be relatively easy. I have tried searching online and found nothing.  So I am curious, is ther any "easy" or easier way to do this. Currently I have drawn one square and am using the rectangular patter to draw only in one direction at a time and draw about 166 each time.  This hasn't made it freeze yet but is taking a while.

[#2]

Welcome to the forum.

First it would be helpful if you specify what version of Inventor you are running and what your system specs are. (i.e. memory, graphics card etc.)

[#3]

I have tried on two different computers.

1. A MAC that is running windows.  Has Autodesk Inventor Professional 2012 Student edition. The computer has 12.0 GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics card.

2. A cyberpower PC that has Autodesk Inventor Professional 2013 student edition. The computer has 32.0GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon HD 7900 graphics card.

One thing I did just notice as I was doing the line by line method, was that it told me at one point that the memory for the undo function had reached it's maximum and did I want to increase it.  Do you think that could be causing the rectangular pattern function to freeze?

Thank you for your help! If you need more info about the computers please let me know. This is my first real attempt to use AutoDesk so I am a little unfamiliar with what is important.

[#4]

Looks like your PC's are plenty powerful enough to handle the job.

I am not sure what you mean by line to line, but one thing I have learned about the pattern feature it is

better to select axis and planes instead of geometry edges.  More stable.

Can you post some images of what you are doing and the messages you are seeing like the maxed out

undo?

[#5]

For large patterns use AutoCAD rather than Inventor.

If needed - you could then bring the dwg solid over into Inventor for everything else.

[#6]

Sorry for the confusion.  As for the line by line-I am using the pattern feature to only reproduce the cirlces (or squares) in one direction as opposed to two directions at once.  So instead of trying to do the whole 166X166 features at one time. I am doing 1X166 at a time and that is working better.  The only error message I received was about the memory for the "undo" feature.  The rest of the times it just freezes and stops working.

It is in the middle of running something right now so I can't post images, but perhaps once it stops I can.

[#7]

Thanks for the response. I don't believe we have AutoCAD though :-(

[#8]

What do you mean by axis and planes rather than geometry? I only know how to select what I want to reproduce and pick a direction.  I did notice there was a button that says geometry in there that I can unclick but that is it.

[#9]

I am referring when it comes to the direction select an axis or plane.

I have experienced inconsistant results when selecting geometry edges.

[#10]

I finally found that we have AutoCAD mechanical on the MAC that is running windows. But I have never used it so I am unsure of what to do.