Scaling Entire Assembly - Component Derive for Assembly?

[johnmills2079]

Skill Level: Although having used parametric solids software off and on for 15 years, am fairly new to Inventor 2010.

Objective: To take a completed chemical reactor vessel, agitator, and drive machinery modeled in Inventor, and scale it down by a factor for layout, cost, and weight estimate studies.

Model: Is a LARGE combination of parts/components including patterns and nested subassemblies.

From all I have read, it appears that what I need to do is make a derivided assembly so that I can assign a scale factor. However, I am obviously missing something fundamental. Everything I read appends "and assemblies", to the instructions or explinations, but I can only get single part functionality.

Starting from a simple standalone assembly, when I click "Component Derive" from "Assemble=>Productiviy", I can ONLY chose a part, not multiple parts or the top assembly, and can create ONLY an .ipt, not an .iam. I have tried every combination of shift and cntrl, right clicks, browser selects, pre-selects, etc of which I can think.

Help is greatly appreciated. System:

HP xw9400, dual 2218 Opteron@2.66Ghz, 16GB ram, Quadro FX3500, XP64 SP3 op sys

[swalton]

All derives take a part or an assembly as an input and outputs a single part file.

The only way to get individual scaled parts from an assembly is to derive each part into a new file and then re-assemble them into a new iam file.

[lfzieba]

This is completely stupid. There's no reason other than a lack of anyone at your company to do any work for this to be this way. This should literally be one button. If I want to scale up a model of 1000 parts I should NOT have to scale 1000 different files manually. The company's name is AUTOdesk not manudesk, or just DESK. I need to scale 15 different parts and now i'm stuck having to do this all manually for absolutely no reason. So unless I can scale it as a derived part and then convert that derived part back into it's components this is useless. I shouldn't have to go and redo all the relationships i made. 

[SBix26]

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@lfzieba wrote:

There's no reason other than a lack of anyone at your company to do any work for this to be this way.

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Exactly correct.  That is the entire and wholly sufficient reason. 

You will not find idle employees at Autodesk whose job is to make this happen and are just not doing it.  As with any group or any person with limited resources (i.e. nearly everybody), Autodesk have to decide where to apply those resources, and this functionality has not been given priority.  Possibly because nobody ever thought of it before you, but much more likely because the demand for it is low compared to many other requests. 

You could search the Inventor Ideas forum to find out if it is a current request, and how many votes it has garnered so far.  If there is no such request, feel free to create one.  Try to describe the need vs. the current situation in detail, and use courteous and professional language.  Then post a link back in this forum so that others can read your idea and vote for it as they see fit.

I expect, though, that it will be difficult to make a compelling case for this, as I suppose it is quite rare among Inventor users to wish to scale an entire assembly.  Inventor is mostly used to create items to be manufactured, often using standard sizes of fasteners and raw materials, standard sizes of holes, etc.  Scaling would be rare, and if needed, much more complicated than a simple scale factor.

Hope that helps,

Sam B
Inventor Pro 2018.2.3 | Windows 7 SP1
LinkedIn

[blair]

I don't think that this would be very doable. If your assembly has items with threaded holes, how would you scale them down and with what thread pitch. The minor hole diameter has to match the type of thread. 

Something as simple as a 1" UNF threaded hole, can have 12 and 14 tpi for a fine thread. Scaled 1/2 factor, will you have a 1/2" hole with 6 or 7 tpi or do you end up with 24 or 28 tpi.  

If you have a sheet metal item, will have end up with a stock material thickness if you scale everything a given scale factor. 

If you are using stock steel shapes, beams, channels, angle and stock bar sizes, how will they scale out? 

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! I get your point. Indeed, the workflow to scale the entire assembly is indeed tedious. You could use Steve's suggestion to derive. Or, you can use Direct Edit command and scale the entire body within each part. However, you still have to do it for every part.

My question to you is why do you need to scale the entire assembly? To what scale? If you simply want to print the assembly in a smaller scale, you could use Derive Assembly -> set the scale factor. The entire assembly will be derived as a single part with multiple solids. Is this what you are looking for?

Many thanks!

[kelly.young · Accepted solution]

Hello @lfzieba I see that you are visiting as a new poster to the Inventor Forum.
Welcome to the Autodesk Community!

• Create a New Part.
• Derive the assembly at your desired Scale to create solid bodies of the parts.
• Make Components to a new assembly, all solid bodies will become new parts scaled individually.
• If you want to make a change to the 'small' original assembly it will update in the larger assembly.

Here is a screencast showing how to accomplish this:

Alternatively, if you make the part parametric from the beginning you should be able to scale it to any size you want. 

Hope that helps!

Please select the Accept as Solution button if a post solves your issue or answers your question.

[lfzieba]

The point is that the scaling of a digital part is trivial for a machine.
We live in an era of 3D printing and floating point calculations there is
absolutely no reason for classifications of part sizes to hold back a
floating point system. A simple renaming of parts with a scaling factor
takes care of everything here. Its absolutely not a problem for custom
parts and the worst that should happen is you should be warned : warning,
stock parts are you sure you want to scale these items? The system can
literally add a single string saying rescaled by factor X. There is
absolutely no reason for this feature to not exist. The point of software
is to make life easier for the designer not more difficult. Computers are
designed to automate tasks, so why is this feature manual? This needs to be
addressed because I know for sure if solid works has this feature I will
definitely not think twice about moving if I need manually adjust 1000+
items or just install some other software and leave autodesk back in 1999.

[blair]

It sounds like you're in school. 

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Lukas,

I suspect you are trying to print parts. If yes, the workflow Kelly shows in the video and the workflow I described earlier is what you need to do. Simply start a new part and derive the entire assembly as a multi-solid body part and give a scale factor. In this way, you can get the scaled geometry immediately.

Another approach would be using iLogic rule or VBA to iterate through each part programmatically and scale the part accordingly. This approach allows you to apply individual scale factor if need be.

I could be wrong but I am not aware of any professional 3D feature-based parametric solid modeling CAD tool offering out-of-box workflow scaling all parts in an assembly (AutoCAD can scale bodies but it is not feature-based and parametric modeling). Do you know any? There is no technical limitation here. It should be doable. The reason why this workflow is absent from professional CAD systems, is that the users of these tools do not need to scale parts frequently. Also not all parts can be or should be printed. You probably know better than I do that 3D Printing technology is not new. It has been developed for 20 years. In the past few years, the consumer-grade 3D printers just become more affordable.

Could you elaborate your need to have this ability? What kind of design are you working on?

Many thanks!

[lfzieba]

If your response to we need new features in our software is : we dont take
you seriously the we are perfecgly happy to stop taking your company
seriously. Let me know if I need to start telling people that your
competitors have a superior product even if they don't offer the feature
either because if I have to suffer through stupid drudgery because you
deliberately refuse to make a product that is easy to use theb you can
suffer the drudgery of disputing hundreds of claims of you product being
rubbish. You are an autodesk employee of you are standing here telling me
that your solution to you software lacking functionality is rhetoric just
let me know if you are serious and I will escalate this because you are
deliberately hamstringing your own functionality in the bid to feel like
you won an argument on an internet forum.

You have 2 options.

1. Take the red letter, read it act accordingly to provide a solution to
improve your product.

2. Dismiss this, giggle at the suggestion that another feature should be
added.

Either way you are wasting my time and if you want to become a priority for
me I am happy to divert my resources to taking a chunk of your market share
because either way this cuts into my profit and if I am losing money I
might as well lose money and do damage at the same time because then I get
to have MY little giggle.

Your conduct is disgraceful and your response is completely unprofessional,
your response to this is disgusting. If you want me to deal with the
Germans instead of you just let me know and we can go back to 1939. I can
deal with a company whose staff don't respond to feature requests with
sarcasm.

[lfzieba]

I need to scale several assemblies based on part sizes as they were built
under different specifications the assemblies need to remain assemblies as
the data needs to remain in a by-part state so that disassembly after
scaling is possible. Ie. they need to remain assemblies there isnt any
getting around it or excusing it. Theres no reason for it to not be a one
click option and I shouldnt have to rely on doing backflips over a shark
pit to get it done. There may be a way to do it all via the task scheduler
but doing it manually is completely unacceptable or your software is
completely unprofitable as I will have to pay for this conversion to be
done manually. So i need 18 different assemblies scaled. They need to go in
as assemblies and come out as assemblies. There isnt an excuse for there
being no feature for this and if the excuse is that it requires a workflow
there needs to be documentation in THIS thread on how to accomplish this.

[lfzieba]

The limitation is there begin too many parts to handle. So now i need to learn VBA to carry out something that should be doable in 1 click. Great. such a good product. You know guys when i sell a product what i truly want is for the people buying it to have to us a different one to get it to actually work. 

[lfzieba]

So what you are telling me is i have no reason to pay you for your software? Okay. It's good to know because then we can make sure this is on the first page of google when anyone searches this to show them that your software isn't worth paying for. 

[lfzieba]

I want to say thanks, except having done this used my energy to make your company more valuable by making your documentation more extensive at the cost of my time, when this should have been on the front page of google from the get-go. 

[lfzieba]

Thanks Kelly. You are an asset to your company.  I'll hire you on the spot. 

Edited by
Discussion_Admin

[SBix26]

@lfzieba

Neither @blair nor I are Autodesk employees, we are users of the software.  This forum is for peer to peer support, though Autodesk employees, such as Johnson & Kelly, do keep an eye on things and respond when they can be helpful.

What I'm trying to point out is that, while technically possible, your desired functionality hasn't been implemented because of relatively low demand vs other requests.  While the math is pretty straightforward and already exists within the application, implementing something like this would require a bunch of labor to design the user interface and make sure that there are no unintended consequences for any of the nearly infinite variety of different assemblies that this could be applied to.  So, given the effort required and the low demand, I suppose (remember, I don't work there) Autodesk has elected to apply resources elsewhere.  You may disagree with that decision, and make the case for changing it, but currently that's what we users have to work with.

So, if your only modeling task is to effortlessly scale a complex assembly, then I agree that you should not spend your money on Inventor, and you should discourage others who have only that task to perform from doing so.

Sam B
Inventor Pro 2018.2.3 | Windows 7 SP1
LinkedIn

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Lukas,

If Inventor isn't a good solution for you, yes we have competitors and there are other solutions for you. I would be sorry to see you using our competitors' offering but it is your choice and I cannot do anything about it. As long as you use Inventor and you have an issue to resolve, I am more than happy to take a look and discuss with you. If you have other objectives, I am sorry that I cannot help much.

I do believe this particular request can be done via iLogic rule or VBA code. Let me ping our forum iLogic expert. @Curtis_Waguespack.

Hi Curtis,

Lukas would like to be able to scale all components within an assembly with a click of button. Is it doable using iLogic?

Many thanks!

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Hi johnsonshiue,

This is an interesting idea. Automating the creation of the derived parts, etc. is one approach, but I think we might be able to automate the creation and update of a DirectEdit object in each part in the assemby to do this, and provide a "one click" solution, without generating any new files.

There are some interesting concerns here as well. 

The first would be the sort of thing that blair mentions which would "engineered" or "style based" features such as:

• threads
• standard shapes such as standard steel profiles
• sheet metal features based on styles based thicknesses 

Scaling components that contain these types of features would produce errant results that don't produce real word outputs when a simple scale factor is applied. Of course this might not be a concern for some simple designs, but it does make an "Assembly Scale" tool flawed by concept for many, many other types of professionally designed products that use standard or style based shapes and features.

The second concern here is spending time assisting someone who has demonstrated such a demanding and aggressive attitude straight from the start. Experience has taught me to walk away from those types of personalities as interactions with them are not very rewarding. But nonetheless I'll see if I can put together a simple example that will work for "generic" designs that don't make use of standard features or profiles. 

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[Anonymous]

Here is what you need!

(Sorry, couldn't resist!)