Solid Body Palooza!

[#1]

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

[#2]

"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!

[#3]

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!

[#4]

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

[#5]

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.

[#6]

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

[#7]

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. 

[#8]

I concur,

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

[#9]

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.

[#10]

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!

[#11]

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!