2018 Link sheet metal issue

[jletcher]

 Something to look at.

when you derive a sheet metal and use the "Link Sheet Metal Styles" it does not change the Material type.

It should be MS

[jtylerbc]

When you drop the Material list down in that dialog box, do you have "By Sheet Metal Rule" as an option?  If so, I think selecting it will solve your problem.  I ran into the same thing while revamping my SM templates recently. 

I think it happens if the template file was explicitly set to a material.  Make sure the material in the Sheet Metal.ipt template (or whatever template file you're using) is also set to "By Sheet Metal Rule".  Then it should stop doing that for future parts as well.

[jletcher]

I want the sheet metal template to be set to the most used.

This sounds like a work around for a half baked feature.

Should not matter what my template has if it is to follow the style should do it correctly 100% or remove it.

Thanks for the reply

[jtylerbc]

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@jletcher wrote:

I want the sheet metal template to be set to the most used.

This sounds like a work around for a half baked feature.

Should not matter what my template has if it is to follow the style should do it correctly 100% or remove it.

Thanks for the reply

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It absolutely matters what your template says.  With your combination of settings, you are telling it to:

1. Set the material to "MS" based on the Sheet Metal rule.
2. Now apply an override to change it to "304" when using that template.

This is not the result of a "half-baked feature".  It is doing exactly what you are telling it to do.  You are creating a conflicting combination of settings.

Put another way - Why would it follow the style when you specifically told it not to?  How is a computer program supposed to know which of your incoherent instructions to actually follow, and which to ignore?

To resolve this, you need to stop giving it conflicting information.  Set the template to "By Sheet Metal Rule", and set your other Sheet Metal Rules to use the more common material.  If you set a material in the template, then it will override the rule and be used instead.  So you need to be consistent, and either control everything from rules or everything from templates. 

Either method of assigning the material works on its own, but mixing them results in the conflict being resolved as an override, which is clearly not what you wanted.  So stop doing it wrong. 

"Clicking the "By Sheet Metal" setting when you want to control the material By the Sheet Metal Rule is a workaround."  That makes sense to you somehow?  Are you really so insistent that you can never be wrong that you can't even take advice on a clearly, obviously incorrect setting?

[jletcher]

 You see it one way I see it another. Why does my opinion on something wrong? I did not rant I stated something you gave me a workaround. I’ll explain, see when I press a button to do what it says, it should overwrite everything needed to do such anything less is a half baked feature.

I could go on but not here to make fuse. I just want the button to do what it says no mater of my settings.

 Enjoy

[jletcher]

Oh one thing to add. See reason for half bake is also it changed everything but that.

It changed the “sheet metal rule” it changed the “unfold rule” it did not change the material.

care to explain why it change my template on those and not material?

[jtylerbc]

The material behavior is completely separate from anything to do with linked rules from a Derived Part, so let's take that out of the discussion for the moment.  Instead, consider a single part that contains a sheet metal rule that drives the material.  Assume that initially it is set up correctly, so that it is actually driving the material.  You can then override that result by setting a material on that particular part.  Presumably, this would be done because you're making an exception to accommodate a similar material that you don't use often enough to justify making a separate rule for it.

If there is a material setting in your template other than "By Sheet Metal Rule", you are defining the template to already have that override built in.  You are defining what should be the exception case as being the default.

When we look back at the case of the linked rules from a master part, the only thing that changes about the behavior is that the master part (instead of your mouse click) is choosing the sheet metal rule.  The override effect of the template material doesn't change in this situation.  Inventor sees it as you telling it not to follow the Sheet Metal Rule setting for the material, because you defined an override.

With your combination of settings, you are literally telling Inventor to do the following:

1. Make the Sheet Metal Rules in the Derived Parts obey the settings in the master part.
2. Assign the material based on the Sheet Metal Rule.
3. Never mind, ignore the material assigned by the Sheet Metal Rule.  Use the material defined in the part instead.

How you wish it worked isn't really relevant.  If wishes mattered, I'd be sitting on my private beach eating a burger right now instead of writing this.  What matters is how it actually works, and what settings you need to change to make it do what you want it to do.  For the tools as they currently exist, and the results you are trying to achieve, you are setting it up incorrectly.  No amount of philosophical argument about the design of the software is going to change that.  Solve the practical problem with the tools as they are, instead of complaining that the answer isn't what you wish it was.

[jletcher]

Not buying it.

Here is why.

I have some styles that are set to generic material like my 1" thick. If I build my master and tell it to be "X" material and have multi solids when I go to make parts and tell it to "Link sheet metal styles" it needs to change the derived material to also be "X" material I have in the master.

 So if a costumer calls and says now he wants it out of material "XX". What you are saying it will never change that material from generic I now have to go to every derived part and change it because I have 1" thick set to generic.

I am not about to set up 30 1" thick styles so all the materials can be called out in them or 157 1/8" thick styles so I can have material all linked. blue plastic, black plastic, S/S, HR P&O, and so on.

Your style library would be 1000 miles long. And with all the issues they have with this style stuff I would be scared it would get corrupted.

It is a half baked feature.

That link should overwrite everything needed to match the master 100%.

I know you all hate me and will never agree but I still need to let Autodesk know of this half baked feature and someone with common sense may see why I say it and agree.

Thanks for reply and all.

[jtylerbc]

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@jletcher wrote:

 So if a costumer calls and says now he wants it out of material "XX". What you are saying it will never change that material from generic I now have to go to every derived part and change it because I have 1" thick set to generic.

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It's not that it will "never change the material from Generic".  It's that it's changing the material TO Generic, as an override to what the rule said.  Aside from that fundamental misunderstanding, what you described is exactly the workflow.  But normally, that would be used as an exception in a setup that was primarily driven by sheet metal rules.

If I were preparing for a situation like this, I would set up the materials to follow the sheet metal rule, including in the template, and define the sheet metal rule materials as the most common material for that thickness.  Then if the oddball exception case popped up, I would override the material in the parts.  Rather than manually going into each part as you described, I would go into the BOM for the assembly, add the Material column, and change all the materials in all the parts from that one screen.  The key thing is letting the rules drive the common scenario, and then manually defining the material exceptions when you need them.

Instead, you're setting up a configuration where you are defaulting to an override, then trying to make the standard apply as the exception.

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@jletcher wrote:

I am not about to set up 30 1" thick styles so all the materials can be called out in them or 157 1/8" thick styles so I can have material all linked. blue plastic, black plastic, S/S, HR P&O, and so on.

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If you actually have that many options, and are unwilling to do the work necessary to set it up properly (which may be understandable given the number of combinations), then perhaps controlling material by rule isn't the best choice for you in the first place.  My setup is entirely rule-driven, but in my case that currently results in a total of about 70 rules.  Many of those rules actually have geometric differences based on AISC guidelines for minimum bend radii for bent plates, which is dependent on both material and thickness.  So they needed to exist anyway.  If in your scenario the only difference is the material, rather than the bend parameters, then maybe you're not gaining anything from the use of rule-driven materials.

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@jletcher wrote:

That link should overwrite everything needed to match the master 100%. 

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That's exactly what it would do, if you would just stop overriding it.  You are specifically telling it not to match the master, then complaining when it does exactly what you told it to do. That's not a software flaw, that's user error.

[jletcher]

 Sure it is all me......... Happy

And I am telling it to match the master not the template that is what that button is for..

[mcgyvr]

Just did a quick test for my own knowledge but...

It is my opinion that the material choice in the source part should also be carried over into the derived part if the "Link sheet metal styles" is selected.. (so I agree with jletcher here)... as well as any other setting regardless of being "overridden" or not as everything in the "sheet metal defaults" to me is the "sheet metal styles"..

One big problem I see here is that there is a disconnect in naming.. Had that check box said "Link sheet metal rule"  or "link sheet metal defaults" then its operation should be clear.. What encompasses the "sheet metal styles" ? 

The help documentation does not even mention this checkbox..

The fact that the word "styles" was used to me implies more than just the sheet metal rule

[Curtis_W]

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@jletcher wrote:

 Sure it is all me.........

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No, it's at least you and me... probably others as well.

I only skimmed through the discussion, but I think these settings have been added to and cobbled onto over the years to the point that the interface and "way it works" seems somewhat cryptic to me, and takes some study each time I have to deal with it.

This area was always a little murky since the sheet metal redesign in ? ( Inventor 2009 ??? ) . Then with the addition of derived multi-body parts to sheet metal components, it became a bit more fragmented. 

So in short, I think all of these settings are in need of a redesign in order to make it more discover-able to new and existing users.

Anyway, I'm really just posting to mention the bug reported in the link below to point everyone to this as well, just in case this is at play also.

It might not be (again I didn't read this discussion well)

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-forum/bug-sheet-metal-solid-doesn-t-follow-default-rule-with...

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

[jtylerbc]

@Curtis_W, I don't think that bug is in play here. 

To see a difference between the material assigned by a sheet metal rule and the actual material of the part, you don't even need a derived part.  Just make a part that contains a sheet metal rule that specifies a material, and then set the part's material to anything else other than "By Sheet Metal Rule".  This is fundamentally not a question about multisolids at all - it's about the relationship between Sheet Metal Rule and Material.

• In the rule settings, you can specify a material.
• In the Sheet Metal Defaults dialog box, you can set the part's material to either "By Sheet Metal Rule", or to a specific material.
• If you set it to a specific material, it now ignores the default material from the Sheet Metal Rule and uses the specific one you selected, overriding the rule.

This is essentially the same logic as the way Materials and Appearances work.  You can set up a default Appearance for a Material, but can subsequently override that Appearance if you want, for example, a particular part that is Steel but painted Red.  The cause of @jletcher's issue is that he has applied that material override in the template file, which means that the sheet metal rule material specification now essentially does nothing.

I can agree that the naming is inconsistent, and I'm not crazy about that.  But there have been other places that I've seen the terms "Sheet Metal Rule" and "Sheet Metal Style" used interchangeably, so I went into this process already assuming they meant the same thing.  In the Style Editor there are two types of "Sheet Metal Styles" listed - the Sheet Metal Rule and the Unfold Rule.  Maybe that's what they were trying to encompass by using the blanket term "Styles" instead of "Rules".

A little background on my position here - we're not historically heavy sheet metal users.  As part of our 2018 implementation, I set up the first sheet metal rules we've ever even bothered with (previously we just edited the Default rule on a per-part basis).  All of this is fresh in my mind because I just finished doing it a few weeks ago.

Going through it for the first time, I found the setup to be pretty straightforward.  Perhaps my lack of familiarity with older versions made it clearer for me, because I wasn't carrying over legacy knowledge?  I never used Inventor sheet metal before 2010 or so - before that I was mostly modeling cast parts.  While setting up the template and rules, I initially created exactly the same situation @jletcher has now.  I immediately found that the material wasn't updating when I changed the active SM Rule.  I removed the specific material setting in the template (which was just a legacy of our previous template anyway), and have had no further issues with it.

If you try to define a material through the Sheet Metal Rule and in the part itself, you have created a conflict.  That conflict must be resolved in one of three ways:

1. The Rule Wins
2. The Part Wins
3. Error Message - Make the User Fix It.

Hopefully we can all agree that there is a conflict, and the discussion is really just about how to resolve it.  Option 3 would annoy everyone, so the choice is really between 1 and 2.  This is a somewhat arbitrary decision, and it seems to me that Autodesk went with the option (2) that was the most consistent with the way other styles behave (such as the previously mentioned Material and Appearance relationship).  If Option 1 is preferable to some of you, maybe someone should get an Idea going to have it changed.

I'm not arguing that the design of the tool is perfect (even though it happens to make sense to me personally).  I have just been pointing out that the tool as currently designed is being used incorrectly to achieve the desired result.  Even if an Idea was accepted, we'd probably be looking at (at least) a couple of years before it would be implemented.  It wouldn't solve the immediate problem of what James needs to do with his rules and template in the meantime.

[jletcher]

 There is no override in my template. My template is set to most used at the clients shop and should have nothing to do with the option I click to tell it to override the template.

 I think you have something backwards and derived and multi sheet metal has a lot to do with the issue seeing that is where the problem is. So saying what you said tells me you are not following what I am doing maybe.

I am telling the master to override my template when I click that option. If it does not it is half baked option.

[jletcher]

"To see a difference between the material assigned by a sheet metal rule and the actual material of the part, you don't even need a derived part."

 The derived part comes from the multi sheet metal master so it is 100% needed.

[johnsonshiue]

Hi James,

The behavior does not sound right to me. It is inconsistent with my test result. If the derive part does not have any pre-existing body, "Link sheet metal styles" option should make the source style the default and the material style should follow also. But, if there is a pre-existing body, the default would not change. Is it what you are seeing?

Could you share an example of the template and the source part so I can reproduce the behavior?

Many thanks!

[jtylerbc]

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@jletcher wrote:

There is no override in my template. My template is set to most used at the clients shop and should have nothing to do with the option I click to tell it to override the template.

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That is the override.  Any material setting other than "By Sheet Metal Rule" acts as an override to the material that the rule specifies. 

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@jletcher wrote:

 I think you have something backwards and derived and multi sheet metal has a lot to do with the issue seeing that is where the problem is. So saying what you said tells me you are not following what I am doing maybe.

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What I'm saying is that the discrepancy between the material specified in the SM Rule and the material specified in the part acts identically whether you're in a multisolid or not.  The disconnect is not between the master part and the derived part.  It's a conflict between the two possible ways of specifying the material in the part, regardless of whether it's derived from a multisolid or is just a standalone part.

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@jletcher wrote:

 I am telling the master to override my template when I click that option. If it does not it is half baked option. 

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No, that's not how it works.  When you assign a material in the part  (which in your case, is predefined in the template), you're telling it to override the rule.  It works the opposite of the way you're trying to set it up.

See attached demo files.  The only difference between these two files is that the one labeled "Not Working" has a material assigned in the part. They both contain two Sheet Metal Rules - one that creates 12 GA Steel, and one that creates 20 GA ABS Plastic.   The "Not Working" version has a part-level override to Wood (Walnut), emulating your template material specification.  Note that if you change the active SM Rule in the "Working" version, the material changes per the rule.  In the "Not Working" version, it remains as the wood material regardless of the active rule.

The demo files are individual parts, not multisolids.  I am posting them in that form to demonstrate my point from earlier that this behavior extends beyond multisolids.  I'm sure you will insist that means they are not the same problem, so I will try to get back later and post a multisolid version as well to demonstrate that the behavior isn't different.

[jtylerbc]

Multisolid version of the example is attached.  This includes two derived sheet metal parts.  Sheet Metal Rules are linked to the master part (SM Multisolid Example Layout.ipt).

• SM-01-Rule Working:  No material defined at the part level.  Changing the material via the two "Demo" SM Rules in the master part will work properly.
• SM-02-Rule Not Working:  Material is defined as "Wood (Walnut)" at the part level, emulating a material defined in the template.  Changing the sheet metal rule in the master part will not change the material.  It will remain "Wood (Walnut)" regardless of which rule is applied.

To fix SM-02 to work properly with the rule materials, open Sheet Metal Defaults, and change the Material setting to "By Sheet Metal Rule".  This part now works properly as well.

[jletcher]

 The derived part does not have any bodies in it.

The derived part is made from standard sheet metal template. The template is set for most common used at the shop. .125 S/S / material 304#3 FINISH / unfold rule 11GA, S/S.

I do not set the "By sheet metal rule" because Mild Steel and HR P&O, HR, Galvanize, and so on have the same unfold rule so I am not about to have 200 to a 1000 sheet metal styles if the bend deduction is the same. It would be a mess for the users to scroll and find.

Here is what I do.

 I start by using my sheet metal template and I make multi body sheet metal parts in it. lets say 4 bodies. All same material all same thickness .187. the material is MS in this case. I tell it to make components in the options I tell it to use my sheet metal template (settings above). I check the link sheet metal styles and go.

As the drawings are being made we noticed the material did not change to MS it stayed 304#3 FINISH. The sheet metal rule changed as did the unfold rule but not the material. So I started to play and noticed no matter what I changed the material in the master multi body file the derived parts material never changes.

 I understand what @jtylerbc is saying but that is not how it should work. In order for his way to work I would need

20ga - MS

20ga- HR P&O

20ga- Galvanize

20ga- Spring Steel

20ga- HR

20ga- CR

20ga- UHMW Black

20ga- UHMW Reground

20ga- UHMW white

20ga- UHMW Gray

Then I would need another set for S/S and finishes then yet another for Alum, brass, copper, and so on.

And that is just the 20ga I still have what 30 to 50 more thicknesses to go can you imagine the list and that is what @jtylerbc don't understand.

As for sending samples right now I don't have the time to be here let alone make you a sample right now.

When I enjoyed Inventor I would have went home and would made up a sample but I no long enjoy it. With all the issues 2018 has cause I am still trying to get client up to 100% productivity. But if I find a time slot I will try to get you sample. I can't supply clients file DOD restrictions.

Thanks for the reply.

All I am trying to do is make Inventor more user friendly like it was in the day if that is wrong and seem it is to many here and with Autodesk I will just not post these things any longer.

And I thought I did good with not ranting but still can't win.

[mcgyvr]

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@johnsonshiue wrote:

Hi James,

The behavior does not sound right to me. It is inconsistent with my test result. If the derive part does not have any pre-existing body, "Link sheet metal styles" option should make the source style the default and the material style should follow also. But, if there is a pre-existing body, the default would not change. Is it what you are seeing?

Could you share an example of the template and the source part so I can reproduce the behavior?

Many thanks!

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huh? What was your test?

What James is showing is out of the box Inventor functionality (at least in 2018 for sure.. not sure if this issue was fixed in 2019)..

To duplicate all you need to do is

1-Create a sheet metal part and set the sheet metal defaults by selecting the sheet metal rule then in the material dropdown pick one that is not the default material of the sheet metal rule.

3-save part

4-Create a new sheet metal derived from that and check the link sheet metal styles..

Now see that the material selection you picked is not carried over to the new part..

No need for anyones files for that.. Its how Inventor works..