New assets added to dwg not showing or updating in Inventor assembly

[jnewon]

Hi All. 

The struggle is real. I feel like autodesk products are never straight forward or intuitive. I have had Factory Design since 2009 and have tried working with it but have never been able to design a workflow that would get me to the finish line. It's been frustrating.

Now I want to give it a real go since I have been designing many many layouts and I'm really hoping this could simplify my life.

My road block at the moment is that the added dwg asset is not getting added to the 

inventor assembly.

So my workflow starts with the dwg and I place assets. When I finish I use the open in inventor button and it opens inventor factory assembly with the dwg underlay and the assets models in the assembly. All good so far.  I save the assembly. The trouble is when I update the dwg with new assets. It doesn't update the assembly with the new asset models. The dwg underlay is correct but no models. The only way I have been able to add all the asset models is to delete the assembly and recreate it. This seem dumb to me since I may have a idw elevation drawing attached to it. 

Is there a way to update the assembly to get the new assets?

BTW the update button in the assembly doesn't do it.

 

Thanks

John

[yizhou.cao]

Hi John,

I am sorry to hear that you are having troubles with the workflow. Are you using 2021? Can you reproduce the issue with any assets? Would it be possible for you to record a video with a simple layout demonstrating the issue?

Thanks,

[jnewon]

@yizhou.cao 

Thanks for the reply. I believe the problem lies with the dwg file. I was trying to make a video and inventor kept crashing. It was odd. I tried using a different dwg and it worked better. The Inventor assembly was updating /adding and removing assets like I would expect when the dwg was changed. So again I think the problem lies with the dwg file I'm using to put the assets in.

With that said, some of the dwg file I receive from my clients are a mess. I define mess as 1) they are not flat, 2) very large, 3) full of unused blocks and layers, and 4) missing x-ref. 

I can fix most of the above, but is there a process, a standard, things to check, a limit to the client dwg in order for it to work well with Inventor?  What do you do to prep a dwg for use in Inventor?

Thanks again 

John

[yizhou.cao]

There is not limit to the dwg files. We have customers creating very complex factory layouts that work well for them. However, there are all kinds of crazy things you can do in AutoCAD. It's possible that data may become corrupt and causes problems. If you run into crashes, please do send in the crash report with your email and some description. We might reach out to you to get more information.

We'll be happy to take a look at your data set if you can share it. My email address is "yizhou.cao at autodesk.com".

[liqinomickey]

Hi @jnewon ,

I think what you mentioned here might be some clue.

1) they are not flat, if a factory asset is contained in a block, or array, it will not be populated to 3D after open in Inventor. You can use the "Batch Explode" function in ACAD to check if there are such assets.

2) very large, as Yizhou said, it should not be a problem,

3) full of unused blocks and layers. This one could be a reason, if the block definition was already in AutoCAD and place a newly updated block it will still use the old one. Shall we use "Purge" in AutoCAD to get rid of some unused blocks and layers.

4) missing x-ref. I haven't heard of a missing x-ref might block 3D generation for existing dwg. 

Yes, what Yizhou said, if you could share the data with the problem, and send the CERs, we would be able to help further. Thank you.

Mickey

[CGBenner]

@jnewon 

Do you still need help with this question?

[pedro.lopezMGBEC]

Well I have the same issue with the 2024 Version (Inventor/AutoCAD/Naviswork) and is interesting because it doesn't work when you use copy in AutoCAD to copy the asset. So when you do this it will not update the 3 D layout in Inventor (and Im using the Asset Factory Tutorial files).

Now when you delete the copy, place the asset from the palette, and open in INventor from AutoCAD is updating the 3D model. To be completely honest, Inventor would detect when is a change/update and regenerate the geometry immediately based on the layout that was updated in AutoCAD Arch. and that will work both ways!

[stefanie_you]

Thank you @pedro.lopezMGBEC , yeah, it's a known issue in FDU 2024 and we have fixed it, which will be delivered by next update FDU 2024.1, thank you.

[pedro.lopezMGBEC]

thank you very much, that will be great, you know maybe you can help me with this one, I have notice that After I installed FDU Naviswork behaviour is quite slow, Im not sure why is that, and it is certainly a problem for me because Im training my delegates some times in Inventor to Revit workflow and I use Naviswork as well in my trainings sessions, is there any particular configuration that I can change that will help with this?

[stefanie_you]

Sure @pedro.lopezMGBEC , would you please clarify more on which workflow you see the low performance? open the layout in Navisworks or some other workflows? thank you! and it would be much helpful if you could attach the dataset seeing issue with us, or share with me through email stefanie<dot>you<at>autodesk<dot>com.

[Logos_Atum]

Same here, also 2024 version. I tried to specify the problem in a new post. As it´s been solved, I´ll close my post.

Thanks!

[Logos_Atum]

Hello,

it does not seem to work even with the 2024.11 update released just now. Are we supposed to do a reinstall?

EDIT: I mistook the Inventor for the FDU update! Sorry on my behalf.

Kind regards

Daniel

[stefanie_you]

Thank you @Logos_Atum for the feedback, you mean the issue in this comment？ if that's the case,  the fix is in FDU side, which will be released in FDU 2024.1, not in Inventor 2024.1

[Logos_Atum]

Ah, thank you for pointing that out. That slipped me.

[SiEngineer]

@stefanie_you When do you think the FDU 2024.1 update will drop? I just downloaded the 30 free trial of FDU to try and create a demo for our company to try and get them to buy it. I need the copy feature to work so I can sell it to them and the clock is ticking. What is the current timeline to get this fixed and do expect to get this released in the next 2 weeks?

[stefanie_you]

Thank you @SiEngineer for supporting our product! current plan for FDU 2024.1 will be late Oct. or Nov.
As a workaround before official fix is released is to place the same asset from asset browser, please let me know any other I could do for you, thank you. 

[stefanie_you]

Hi @SiEngineer another option is that you may try our 2024.1 beta build , which is planned to be alive in middle of Sep. through Beta community https://feedback.autodesk.com/project/article/default.html?cap=fb144137-35ee-42c9-9624-e3793b19a0b2&....

[jnewon]

Hey.

I'm running Inventor 2024.3.2, FDU 2024.1.2, & ACAD Mech 2024.0.2

I started this post and have found no answer to this problem. I find factory very unstable between AutoCAD and inventor. I only use factory with inventor because of this. Today again I go thru the futile efforts to find a way to make this work because I really want this to work. I have tested numerous different workflows. Today I tried a new clean dwg and adding factory system assets. Then open inventor from the AutoCAD factory ribbon. At first this seem to work well and will populate inventor with all the asset models. However as you work back and forth with inventor and or AutoCAD in these files Inventor stops populating the asset models and the dwg becomes write protected. All just seem to grind to a halt. That's today. Minutes ago.

There just seem to me a lot of moving parts and issues to make this work. One big thing for me is that inventor just doesn't handle dwg's well at all. Whether it's an underlayment or an import, it's just a dog when it comes to handling these files.  Client DWG's are even worst. I can't seen to find any information/workflows for preparing (cleaning, purging, references,  ect..) client dwgs to work best in a factory environment.

Thanks

Factory Frustrated

jnewon

[Steven_Gao]

There is a known issue(Internal tracked dedect:INVGEN-68072) on it. Development team had some investigation on it but still not have the fix on it so far.
If Inventor and AutoCAD reading and writing the same DWG files at the same time (when executing "Open in Inventor" or "Open in AutoCAD"), the DWG file may be locked, and it's also impacted by the machine environment.
If you want to make it less frequent, you'd better to avoid open it on multiple applications. And please try to close the dwg and reopen it will remove the read-protected issue.