When I imported my materials, some of them came in as a "Misc" category. Can someone tell me how to edit the category for each material? I would like to get these into the Metal/Steel category.
This new materials/apperance editor is going to take some getting use to. Its pretty confusing for me right now.
We discovered a couple of install/uninstall issues with this specific update; we now hope to release it by the end of this week, subject to further testing, etc.
Thanks,
Chris
By any chance will this update include a cure for the famous "I'm going to make 47 copies of this material all with a generic appearance and a .n after the name" bug?
Massimo,
I'm sorry, but you are correct - the Update is not going to be released today; I mention below that we hoped to release it subject to outcome of testing. However, we encountered some issues in testing it internally, this week, so it'll be a while longer yet. I'll provide an update when it's available.
Regarding your final statement, that's something well out of my control/influence & is something that you can only really discuss with your local Autodesk Sales contact or Reseller.
Mike,
No, that infamous issue is not included in the update that is mentioned here, but it is something that is currently being working on.
Thanks,
Chris
Dear Autodesk Customers,
I want to thank you for your patience while waiting for this product update to be released. We continue to review and refine our process to ensure we deliver quality updates as quickly as possible. Please feel free to provide any feedback on this Update and the process in general.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=21028655&linkID=9242019
Best regards,
David
Massimo,
This sounds like something that will need further investigation with your local support team ?
How was your Material property defined in your custom CC library ? Was it mapped to the "Project.Material" Inventor Property, as shown it he attached image, or were you using something else ?
When you migrated your idcl files, had you previously created your custom adsklib file & made it the active library in the project file, before CC lib migration ? See this info in the wiki
Thanks
Chris
Dear Uma,
no, our many families are mainly genuine (created from scratch by me, depending only on xml styles), and in case they are based on standard families the link is suppressed. Nevertheless, wherever they are based or not on standard families the problem happened anyway (it seems to be independent from this link).
Dear Chris,
first of all here you see two shots of how the problem is showing up. The third one shows how the problem comes in the family table (I know that you see several times the same column header: that has been done with photoshop because I am not allowed to disclose certain details of our content center. In any case in those columns there are string values that are not relevant for modeling purposes).
No, I don't think we have one single "standard" material in our library (maybe we have generic/default, but for sure no standard parts based on them). So, even this A2-70 that survived in a couple of cases is NOT a standard material.
in this case all material variations got lost.
In this case one non standard material survived. All the other (11 variations) got lost.
Here you can see the missing cells in the family table (certain columns have beed covered due to copyright issues).
As you can see the members are still there, but the value in the Material column has been lost.
Yes, the material column is the native Autodesk Material column mapped to Project.Material
I went throug the other article that you linked here, and I can confirm that I migrated in the right way (as I do at each migration, even if I didn't know about this whitepaper).
0. I migrated all xml libraries (not relevant any more because they do not affect the modeling environment any more, at least it seems to be like that)
1. I created myAppearance.adsklib and myMaterials.adsklib
2. I tested that all materials and appearances properly worked in the new environment
3. I set up a machine with 100% new environment (included my*.adsklib as primary library)
4. I run a ccFiles migration test on a test ccFiles library (no errors, all parts correctly migrated)
5. I run the ccFiles migration on our working ccFiles (no errors)
Maybe I was not clear: the problem is not affecting migrated parts: those parts have been properly migrated, and they all have their right materials. The problem is coming up when calling the Content Center by "changing size" or by inserting new CC components. As you see from the next image
if I patiently edit the material table and restore the missing cell, everything comes back to work. My problem is that I have almost a quarter of a million members!!
Another funny detail: in certain families certain material grades were based on appearance overrides (I mean that the appearance of the component is not getting the standard appearance of the material, but is getting a different color coming from the myAppearance.adsklib - see the old Autodesk exercise with LEGO bricks, mapped to Member.Color). Those overrides survived perfectly!!!!!
Hei, Autodesk, this is not fair: I need some crying smileys here!!!
With this level of customization, we would need all the necessary files from your 2012 environment as well as those you currently have in your 2013 environment. I don't think there's anything that we can do with this without the actual files. (.idcl, .xml, .ipj, etc)
Do you have any local support that you can approach for help on this, (which will probably expedite it quicker) ?
Thanks,
Chris
Sure - if you have info that will help to get to the root cause of this, then please share.
Thanks,
Chris
THE PROBLEM
Supplying xml, ipj would not be a problem (xml form 2012 you already have, and other than "materials" and "colors" the other do not affect modeling environment)..
.idcl can be more tricky, because I cannot disclose all details of our ccLibraries. Nevertheless I could prepare a special version of 2012 idcl files with information that can be disclosed, files that would give the same problem at a migration to 2013.
Since I have the feeling that no other companies are experiencing this specific problem, and we could not roll back our whole company again to 2012, I patiently begun repairing those members where the materials have been lost, starting from the ones that we use more (like bolts and nuts). Couple of hours a day since when the problem came, I'm already by 30% of our libraries. Of course I could also not wait for a fix from Autodesk, that for obvious reasons would need much more time.
Nevertheless I'm ready to cooperate if this helps bringing the situation forward, but this would mean for me to invest additional time in solving a problem that lies on Autodesk side. Here comes in the "Surroundings" point...
THE SURROUNDINGS
When I moved to this company (middle 2011) I immediately realized that the use of inventor was kind of peculiar: the program, even with subscription for each workstation, was used to less then 10% of its potential (bill of materials written manually, no content center at all, no idea what XML libraries are, modeling strategies as they where in 2004, even the templates were from several editions before and so on). After 1 month that I was here, the CEOs assigned me to start working on the improvement of the system and on the training of employees.
Being previously (2002 to 2011 in Italy) involved in the promotion and training of Inventor, I also started investigating the reasons for this situation. When asking direct questions to my colleagues (even those who are here since 15 years) the only answers coming where like "it has always been a nightmare with this companies selling autodesk products" (as a matter of fact we are talking about 1 company).
In November 2011 the "specialist" form this company taking care of us has visited us a couple of hours in order to explain to our guy (that he thought to be our inventor specialist) how should he build and arrange the content center. By that time our content center was already beyond 50.000 members (but he didn't know) so I listened to him as a "guest" more to understand how much "specialist" he was (not all information he explained were 100% correct and up-to-date but that is another story). We even had to pay him for the visit. Never seen him any more.
My investigation went further, and the most surprising detail that I discovered is that actually in Germany there is only one reseller for Autodesk products. That explains also why in all Germany there is only 1 text block for drawings (I swear: I saw exactly the same text block in so many different German companies). This text block was used before by this reseller in AutoCAD: they just copied (forget about inventor layers, text styles, inventor features) and pushed this same template in all Germany (unfortunately Germans have much to work so nobody invested time in customizing the text block). I don't need to tell you that the revision history philosophy integrated in this text block has nothing to do with Inventor revision history (again: everything gets written manually). So the illness of inventor in Germany and the potential reason why Autodesk might be loosing market shares is the "monopole situation" that somehow came out.
Knowing that Autodesk EMEA Headquarters are here in Aidenbachstrasse 56, that is not farther than 40 min by car from us (35 min with the subway) I even tried to get in touch with these people: I personally spoke to Christian Lang (Sr. Director Manufacturing EMEA) when I met him in Italy in November 2011... I tried to inform Andreas Hofherr about the funny situation... neve heard anything them (even thou Christian asked my business card and promised to react). Finding much more and better support through my connections in Italy, I gave up with these people here, because I could anyway achieve the goals that my CEOs gave me.
So the situation was the following: our "Autodesk Monopolist Reseller" kept showing up once a year when the time for paying the subscriptions came (of course I wouldn't leave 20.000 EUR on the road... 😉 ). When we let him think that we might purchase a "Plant Design Suite" then he came here for a visit, and we explained that we are absolutely not satisfyied with the "support" that we get from them. He immediately offered to support us on those questions that we cannot solve alone (unfortunately those questions are terribly specific, and 99% related to program malfunctionings). Since that time there have not been any further bottlenecks in our development, until....
15.12.2012
When we first attempted the migration to 2013 the big fatal crash that brought me to this post came out. I didn't sleep 3 days to identify the issue and roll back... (the story we know already). Thanks God YOU from USA reacted to my problem, and I felt somhow that somebody from Autodesk was still supporting us, so now we are migrated, almost succesfully. Having some years of experience in IT, I could immediately figure out that the issue was not possible to be solved by local people, and after a few days you confiremd that a bug was found and a fix would have come. Anyway I gave a chance to our local friends to try to support us (once again: more to test them, rather than to obtain a real support, because for supporting us it was already too late). Of course I gave them ALL information in my hands (included the link to this post), exactly as I did with you.
Beside reacting more than 1 month later (sending the standard instructions for inventor material library migration 
), I was quite surprised that the further reaction was:
one day one guy from this company called me on the phone and wanted to tell me how to migrate properly our appearances and materials (because trying to do it themself and get the .adsklib files brought them to the same crash ). From his instructions I immediately understood that he had no idea what we had discussed here in this post more than 1 month before, so I invited him to get to the post and read what was going on in order to be all at the same point. His answer was: "I think it's better that one of us comes by at your place (20 min driving from where they are) and checks the situation personally with you. Have a nice day". Never heard from him any more. Never seen any of them any more (probably they even do not know that SP1.1u2 came also because of our issue, but I might be wrong on this since there is no feedback from them).
I think that you understand that, having other assignments here, I am not very keen to invest time twice, with people who do not read in advance (so it not twice but 3 times more), just for testing the local Autodesk support team. So I am not very happy in wasting 1 hour if one of these guys comes here to do... what shall he do here?? Yes of course: issue an invoice for having been here 
NOW
As you said yourself we have a quite high level of customization and we are using inventor really deeply into some of its features. For us it will be more and more, as that is one of my assignments. It is also clear, that the information that Autodesk might collect with us could be quite precious in improving the product. We are ready to support you in this challenge, even if that would cost us some time (to your information we use inventor in English language). I am ready to move, to share our experience (as long as I am allowed to do it), I can meet you here or even there in USA (ok, that would be much more expensive for us so we should discuss it) but this moves must be done on both sides, and of course they cannot happen through the local reseller.
We should not forget that Autodesk EMEA is here 30 km away.
I do not know if you have the power to move Autodesk people here... that is up to you (i mean "you" marketing strategist rather than "you" technical support people).
So... that's the story....
...just let me know how it goes on by you 😉
Massimo,
Sorry to hear that you have not been receiving the level of support there, that you should expect. I've forwarded this on to my contacts there in Germany; whether anything will come of that or not, I honestly don't know but I'll let you know what I hear back.
As you state, my immediate interest is in helping you with your technical issues. If you can share an example of your 2012 & 2013 idcl files along with the related xml, adsklib & ipj files, etc then I'll follow up directly with development. Of course it might be quicker for you to fix this yourself, but if we fix it then it will benefit anyone else who also has the issue, although I haven't heard of many similar sounding cases.
NDA is not an issue - we have a standard NDA process that means we don't share any customer data with any other customer or won't use any info for our own gains, etc. However, if you have a specific NDA that you need us to sign then we can do that too.
Thanks,
Chris
Dear Trumpy,
the issue has:
- nothing to do with Vault (we do not have any Vault)
- nothing to do with how people access it (it happens also in local environment)
I do not understand what you mean by "structure of inventor installation", but if what you mean is "how has inventor been installed" the answer is: we have several configurations between inventor Std and Pro, being part of PDSp/u or FDSp/u, all of them being installed by deployment. In any case the issue is not depending on this point as well.
Libraries were "compiled" (even if I would prefer to say created) mainly as described in Autodesk guides (i.e.. by last migration everything worked properly)
By the way the story has been told just to show how the situation is so strange here, and to understand if anywhere else something similar is going on.
The Problem
Coming back to the original subject, while repairing the material links I noticed the following peculiarity: in most of cases materials were defined as "expression" for the fist grade, and as override for the following. If I am not wrong this should be also the default Autodesk setting.
- 99% of the overrides have been lost (for some strange reason a couple survived)
- most of the "expressions" got somehow damaged (see image), and then the material has been lost
- a minority of expressions survived, and in those few cases also the material link survived
example of damaged expression
Now I am removing the "Expression" tab from cells, so that the content of that column will be a pure string. I hope it will help for the future...
My immediate interest is that our people can work efficiently: that's my first priority and I am almost done with that. Of cause we are also ready to share the information in order to let Autodesk fix it systematically for all users (even if I have the feeling that we are the only one with this specific issue). Of course I still have the possibility to recreate a 2012 environment, even if it would cost me some time. Migrating from that environment should (and I repeat: SHOULD) bring to the same inconsistency. It this will help also other users I'll be glad to do it.
Moreover we are interested in such things no to happen any more by next migrations coming, and here I hope to have a little bit more luck next time. Normally we do not migrate to the next release before coming out of SP1, even if this time the SP1.1 actually did the real disaster (somehow without SP inventor was still stable). When I prepare a migration for the company, I normally move a couple of months in advance at home, installing the new version, and preparing templates, xml, adsklib (since 2013) and at the very last also idcl files.
This year I was caught in the trap because I did the job at home without SP, and when I deployed I deployed directly with SP1.1u1. Ok, now it's gone.
Nevertheless I personally (and all the Executive Officers of the company who are also visiting the forum just for their personal knowledge), would like to thank Chris and his team for the reaction and the support that they could give us. With the "standard" support that we get from the local distributor(s) we would be still there going back and forth around the problem (have you seen any of them here complaining??). We as a manufacturing company are more oriented to our real core business, rather than in software problems and issues that do not compete to us.
We, as Autodesk subscribers, hope to be able to continue relying on Chris and his team in case other similar cases happen (of course, it will be better if they don't!!).
Till then...
...take care!
