Well, I will say this, there are goods and bads, and the bads aren't SO bad that you want to bash your head into the monitor, but they are like a nat, just buzzing in around your head, and after a while, you find yourself slapping your own face trying to get it, but somehow you keep missing just adding to the agitation.
anyway, the good that I found was this, when you bring the LOD into an explosion, only the parts that are not suppressed show up in the browser, making tweaking what you need super simple since just the parts you want in that view are there, and you don't have to keep scrolling back and forth for that elusive part number you accidentally turned invisible and are now trying to find to turn back on, which is awesome for large assy with thousands of parts! But for me, that's about as far as the good extended.
The bads, for one, it slowed down my computer performance to a low crawl when working in the drawing environment (not the assembly environment, it's very helpful there), but drawings that would normally be just fine to work with were now shooting my memory straight to the red upon opening, and this is after trying to whole 3 GB switch with userva settings and all that. Secondly, depending on just how big the assy is of course, but most times I can work with the idw, ipn, and iam open at the same time allowing me to easily switch back and forth between environments when needed with no issues. Once I started using LODs, then the game changed. I would try working with the files open at the same time, and then I started getting errors like "can't save due to another version of the level of detail being edited," and mind you, only the iam has the actual level of detail, while the other files are just referencing it. This error appears in either of the environments, so sometimes you will be trying to change a view, or even edit the parts list, and then when you go to close the parts list, it won't save the changes because of this error, and the same has happened while trying to edit explosions in an ipn. I would even close the two files that I wasn't trying to edit to make the changes, and the error would still apply. Then, I just recently found out if I check an iam back into our vault, and I leave it in a LOD, the next time any one would check out the assy it would cause inventor to crash.
Of course, I am only relaying my own personal experiences here, so by no means can I speak for any one else on the matter, but the best conclusion that I have come up with is this:
make your LODs for your work environment, once you create your LODs, RMB on the LOD in the browser and say copy to View Rep, now you have created a view rep with just the parts that you want for a specific view, and you can lock it and not have to worry about it changing as you make changes to the assy in other LODs.
Of course, when you go to the ipn, create a new explosion, go to your options and pick the view rep you want, every now and then you will still get that error that I mentioned earlier, but it is dramatically decreased, and I have yet to have any issues with drawing causing the lag that I had described while just using the LODs ever since I started using this method. Take your time and try some different ideas that may work better for you, but thus far this last section has been the best way to get the most use out of the LOD feature that I have found.
J Lackey
XP PRO SP2
INTEL CORE 2
2.66GHz ; 3.25GB RAM
INV 2008 SP 3