Community
cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Solid Body Palooza!

Solid Body Palooza!

I have seen a post similar to this where the writer wished the ability to access the visibility of a solid body via iLogic. I am asking for the ability to suppress via the solid body. As things are now, if I want to suppress a solid body, I have to suppress every feature within the body separately! When doing this via iLogic, it creates a mess! Currently I may be forced to suppress dozens of features –and I I add new ones, I need to remember to add those to the code as well. 

 

The multi-solid body layout part workflow is easily the most powerful design paradigm in Inventor, but the ball was definitely dropped on this one. It was thrown out there and immediately orphaned. We should also have the ability to:

 

  • Add iProperties to the solids that will transfer to the part. Color, Material, Cost, and all of the rest.
  • Ability to organize solid bodies to groups –which become assembles when the “Make Component” command is evoked. Ability to suppress an entire group!
  • A visual indicator of which solid body a feature belongs to would be nice as well. It’s hard to organize a feature tree, but any focus on that would be a help. We finally got folders in assemblies after years of requests, it’s about time to look into cleaning up a parts tree as well. For instance, I put ALL sketches before features (projected geometry is all sketch to sketch –far more stable). I would like to be able to group and hide them. There can be thirty or forty of them and the tree gets incredibly long!
  • Attaching iLogic that would survive the “Make Components” process and become a rule on the other side would be killer as well.

I’m sure I’ll come up with more. Have a great day!

 

Mark Randa
Applied Design Intelligence

 

SolidBodies.JPG

34 Comments
truscher
Enthusiast

"Add iProperties to the solids that will transfer to the part. Color, Material, Cost, and all of the rest"

 

Go Man, Go! This has been a wish item for me as well. I Have found some iLogic based workarounds, but they are very combersome, or hard to teach. I would also point out that being able to keep an assembly in multi-body form inside  a part allows  the  user to "bypass" copy design with a template based workflow. HUGE!

MRanda
Advocate

Tommy! How are you dude!

 

Yea, I have the work-around code posted on my website, but they are no substitute for hard coded programming, and nowhere as extensive as the idea amalgamation above.  Hopefully net year's version will see some attention!

Bondo-Man
Community Visitor

I admit that I am not the most experienced modeler, but what I do know is that the workflows Mark teaches by example on his site are where the real magic of Inventor comes to light!

Any support from Autodesk to streamline this aspect of the software will work wonders toward helping Inventor become the workhorse it can be. Autodesk needs to give this the consideration it deserves!

 

Jerry Bond

dvsmiller9
Advocate

When multibody came out I thought it would be a great tool for some of our purchased parts that are made from different materials (i.e. connectors with brass bodies and PTFE insulators, or headers with copper terminals and plastic bodies).  To be able to do so would let us better calculate mass and center of gravity (smaller assemblies where making the connector all one material becomes a significant contributor). Since we can't currently set each body to a different material within the same part I'm not using multibody at all.

genewojo
Explorer

All of these ideas would be great to have in multi-solidbody modeling and would greatly improve what seems to be the best method of modeling.

 

One more thing that would be very helpful would be an easy way to determine the size of the parts (width, length and thickness) when they become parts through the make components process. There is ilogic to determine the extents of a part or assembly, but it is limited to determining the extends of the part in space relative to the origin planes. This works fine for parts that are aligned to those origin planes, however, if a part is on an angle in the multibody part, when you perform the make components, the resultant part is also on the angle. For instance, a 20mm x 100mm x 300mm part set on a 45degree angle from one of the origin planes results in extents of 84.9mm x 84.9mm x 300mm, not the size of the part.

 

It seems that since Inventor can provide the Volume and mass of a part as physical iProperties, it must somehow know these dimensions. It would be nice if Inventor could share them as iProperties or at least provide an iLogic method of determining the minimum bounding box for a part or assembly.

 

Gene Wojciechowski

MRanda
Advocate

Gene -- You can use iLogic reading driven dimensions or just plain driven dimensions to get the info you need. I do this all the time when creating parts lists. There is a tutorial on my website that addresses how to do so at:


iLogic Tutorial for Creating a Woodworking Cutlist

 

The tutorial is about creating a Shaker Table, but the methodology will hold true for anything you care to design. 

PaulMunford
Autodesk

I concur,

 

This is all good stuff - do it Autodesk - do it now!

scottmoyse
Mentor
Mark your solution works well for LWT on 'Library' or template parts but not for unique parts. In that instance you have to create two or more sketches a dimension projected geometry to get driven dimensions which can be used for the LWT properties. Autodesk need to address this issue ideally via the use of user defined UCS's for components which aren't parallel to the origin planes. I'm not holding my breath, people don't moan about it enough.
scottmoyse
Mentor
For the record I love the suggestions for highlighting which features belong to which bodies. However a much older problem than that is being able to tell which workplace or face a sketch is tied to... That really sucks. Regarding assigning properties to bodies I agree to a point. I don't think physical properties should be assigned to bodie's. that's exactly what part files are for. The day Autodesk do that should be the day Fusion360 completely replaces Inventor. Man oh man does the part environment need folders!
MRanda
Advocate

Hi Scott -- Not sure you quite get the physical properties suggestion. I make layout parts that sometimes have over a hundred solid bodies, which are then turned into parts and assemblies which are controlled via the layout part. The ability to assign materials at a solid body level would speed things up dramatically because it would be done as a part of the initial skeletal modeling, and could be controlled much more efficiently at the layout part level which would feed the parts and assembles created from it. It’s an incredibly stable workflow, and lends itself quite nicely to configurators.

 

Hopefully Autodesk will give all of the suggestions here a hard look and exceed expectations. I’d be willing to test things early on if needed. Cheers!

MRanda
Advocate

Another feature to add to this list would be the ability to specify iMates at part level that would translate to the "Made" component. This would go a long way towards the creation of full-featured layout parts that could be used as templates. ALL added functionality to the multi-solid body schema make Inventor LT a more feasible product. Not sure why anyone would buy it now (if in fact it is still available).

 

Mark Randa
Applied Design Intelligence

smithar
Autodesk
Status changed to: Under Review
 
dan_szymanski
Autodesk
Status changed to: Under Review

These projects [US-53640] [US-53641] are under review by the development team. Thanks for the suggestion. -Dan

PaulMunford
Autodesk

Well done smithar and Dan 😄

 

Please give us an update of how this feature request is coming along - even if nothing is happening...

 

Paul

scottmoyse
Mentor

@MRanda wrote:

Not sure you quite get the physical properties suggestion. I make layout parts that sometimes have over a hundred solid bodies, which are then turned into parts and assemblies which are controlled via the layout part. The ability to assign materials at a solid body level would speed things up dramatically because it would be done as a part of the initial skeletal modeling, and could be controlled much more efficiently at the layout part level which would feed the parts and assembles created from it.

 


Mark,

 

I fully understand it, all we do is multi body model. I'm all in on your iLogic desires and organizing parts into folders which translate to assemblies for the make component tool. However, I'm intrigued how you think that defining materials at the solid body level is any more efficient than in the parts (where physical properties belong)? I think that logic is flawed. If you were to say you want the ability to set materials on the bodies along with the ability to push iLogic event triggers (for external rules, because they are more efficient) through to the parts & assemblies then that's a different thing altogether and would be beneficial. However, dealing with conflict management between solid body & part material assignments could get interesting in the same way it has with colour overrides in the past.

 

If Autodesk do this, they may as well ditch assembly files and go down the Fusion route of having everything in a single file. Then you are essentially creating an entirely new product and not adding features to Inventor.

 

While I agree with the need to drive iLogic configurations from Multi body models, I think the materials should still reside only in the parts and have the ability added to allow us to drive/control the material from the source file.

 

Oh and your need to see which body a feature belongs to in the browser is a great one. Its possible to figure that out using the selection filters. But your suggestion will definitely make that process less painful and more efficient. However, there's an issue which can't be solved using the selection filters, and that being able to tell what a sketch is attached to. Is it attached to a work plane? If so which one? If its attached to a face then it can be more obvious but still a PITA to find out. So this would need to be fixed along with the ability to see which body a feature belongs to, I just think the sketch issue is more important.

 

So I hope you see now that I fully get it and have a deep understanding of the workflows involved, its just I don't agree with the way you are suggesting to implement the idea. But at a conceptual level I'm fully behind this idea.

 

Good work for being persistent and driving this forward.

 

Cheers

 

Scott.

MRanda
Advocate

Hi Scott,

 

Thanks for the kind words! The reasoning behind the ability to define Materials, Appearances, and other iProperties at the solid body level would be the streamlining and consolidation of code in configurators for the most part. As is, I need to create a layout part with a good deal of code to get things tested and working properly, then do another large set of mostly redundant code at the assembly level. Of course any changes to the iProperties at the layout part level would need to flow to the component parts just as any changes in features, parameters, etc. do now. I don't see the workflow as a replacement of previous workflows, but I personally would use it pretty much exclusively if implemented.

 

Some of my layout parts have hundreds of solid bodies. Adding iProperties as I develop the model would speed things up enormously. Another advance would be the ability to capture key parameters from the layout part for use in the assembly. For instance: If I have a 'Width' parameter as a key parameter in the layout part, when I use the Make Component command, I tick a checkbox to 'Match Key Parameters' or something like that, which would duplicate the key parameter at the assembly level and link the two. Even better would be the ability to have forms move from layout part to assembly level if desired as well.

 

Hopefully Autodesk will seek input if they do move forward so that a forward thinking workflow could be implemented without too much convolution. Smiley Wink

 

Thanks again Scott,

 

Mark Randa
Applied Design Intelligence

dan_szymanski
Autodesk
Status changed to: Accepted

Accepted ideas [433 & 434]. Thanks!

thyzsz
Contributor

Hopefully solid body`s can also be used for sheet metal parts so we can use the sheet metal tools in the main part.

 

Then it would be easier to create corner seams and flanges etc. that are connected or welded with different parts.

 

 

 

 

meck
Collaborator

I know I'm late to this discussion, but I see no down side to letting the user decide if he wants to use assmbly models or just use the solid body part file as the assembly. I would much rather manage 1 part file than 100+ parts files and an assembly file. Fusion may already have that capability, but Autodesk is slowly merging all of their different design softwares together anyways. The materials are now directly exported between Inventor and Revit for instance.

The only downside I see with this you can't use a single solid body in a part file in another assembly. Or can you? For us everything is a one off anyways.

Meck

Stancler
Explorer

I think it would be good idea to allow select different material properties to each solids of a multi body part. Now you can select only diffrent colours for solids, it would be great to chose different densities as well. If you want to know total mass of multibody part Inventor treats all solids as same materials.

 

1.png

 

2.png

Tags (1)

Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.

Submit Idea  

Autodesk Design & Make Report