Modeling in Inventor, detailing in Mechanical

[Anonymous]

Just curious. Anyone out there using both Inventor and Mechanical 6 to
create your drawings. What I am saying is, using Inventor to create the
models and generate the views and bom. Then exporting that out to Mechanical
6 to be detailed. Yes, I know the views will not update once it is exported.
I feel that Inventor's ability to detail in the idw is still not as strong
or flexable as it is in a 2D package. Especially when dealing with a lot of
circular and cylindrical parts.

So if anyone out there is using both, I would like some of your feedbacks.
Good and bad. Or if you feel that this is not the way to go, please argue
your point. I am open to suggestions. TIA

[MechMan_]

What I dislike most about this approach is that unless you intend to trash the 3D model you'll have to keep up with 2 unassociated data sets. After converting to 2D you need to make it known to your team that the 3D model is no longer an up-to-date and valid design source and in essense that model becomes worthless after a few changes are made. Updating the 2D drawing and 3D model would be a time-consuming and unreliable task. I don't know about you but I always seem to catch a few of my design mistakes during the detailing process and not always during the design modeling process. It's then that the power of parametric modeling and associative drawing views becomes a massive time saver.


MechMan

[Anonymous]

Hi!

Same thoughts as MechMan already wrote...

I'm doing this at the very moment, because I work for a team that only has
Mechanical (2000), and no Inventor. So I generate the views in Inv, export
to dwg and detail it in dwg.

I don't like this - I would much prefer to do everything in Inv - mostly for
what Mechman pointed out - associativity. But in fact I never liked
Mechanical more than Inv, so my approach may be different 🙂

Of course this way (Inv > Mechanical) it is easy to do all kinds of
"cheating" 🙂

Best Regards,
Janek