Bulk Edit Material Properties - Inventor 2016

[Anonymous]

Is there a way that I can edit material properties en masse without using the horrifically unstable "material editor" which cannot stay open for longer than 90 seconds on average before consistently crashing the entire program? Maybe an Excel edit feature? VBA? Anything! I am even willing to learn an entirely new programming language and program custom scripts because that would still be faster and less infuriating than dealing with the catastrophic failure that is the Inventor Material Editor.

I really need to edit the mechanical properties of over 100 custom materials, but unfortunately I don't have the time or the emotional fortitude required to experience hours and hours of crashes due to this terrible, sluggish, laggy, buggy, unstable editor. Each click inside the editor takes around 10 seconds to react, and if I'm lucky, I'll get about 10 clicks in before the next crash. The editor is so unstable and buggy that it is unusable--all I'm trying to do is change the yield stress of materials in our library. If there is no other way, then I calculate that it will take approximately 5 hours of crashing and re-opening to do this incredibly simple thing.

I would greatly appreciate it if anyone can provide a workaround to prevent me from using Autodesk's terrible material editor. Thank you.

I'm using Inventor 2016 on a new Windows 7 machine.

[ADSKDJW4 · Accepted solution]

Hello @Anonymous,

I reviewed the post here and this is something that is not widely reported as to the crashing with the Material manager with Inventor 2016. I looked at the Crash Error Reports submitted with your company domain address and found the last one submitted by you was on Oct 18th. This looks to be related to Vault. As for the immediate question about using some type of custom programming to do this there is nothing out there currently developed by us. You can wait for others to reply on this as there is a possibility someone may have.

I would make sure all files within the project file are stored locally, if these are on the network then pull copies locally, then create a new project file with these local pointers. See if you can then edit the material library file without crashing. You can also try running the Inventor Reset Utility located in the Start>All Programs>Autodesk>Autodesk Inventor 2016> in this flyout you will see that tool.

Inventor Reset Utility

You can also try running this to see if it corrects the issue.

Regards,

Don

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply, Don

Honestly I'm very surprised this isn't a widely-reported issue seeing as we regularly encounter it on all of our workstations. I experience 3-4 crashes per day but stopped submitting error reports out of pure frustration; I'll make sure to consistently submit those from now on. 

I personally believe this is an issue with how Inventor interfaces with the graphics because it seems like 99% of the crashes I experience relate to something visual, whether it be while rotating an object or editing its appearance or material properties in some way. This raises the possibility that it could be a hardware problem on our end, but that seems unlikely seeing as we have no issues whatsoever with the other graphically-intense applications we currently run on the same workstations. Perhaps it has something to do with the material browser running in a completely separate window, which seems to drain all of my resources instantaneously and freeze the entire PC. 

We use Vault Basic and the material library does happen to be located remotely on a server, that way all the workstations can have up-to-date access to the one centralized library. As an experiment I created a new local project like you suggested and the material browser is significantly less sluggish but nowhere near as fluid and snappy as other Inventor features. It was still noticeably clunky feeling. 

Thanks again for the pointers.

[ADSKDJW4]

Hello @Anonymous,

If you feel this is still a bit sluggish or not meeting your expectations after working this way for a few days, send me a private message and we can look at this further. We do get some network issues where its difficult to duplicate as these network configurations can vary from company to company.

Best Regards,

Don

[Monkeyengineered]

it's still awful in 2017, and I'm working on a local copy.

I think it's false to mark the question as solved, when you never answered the original question.

[ADSKDJW4]

Hello @Monkeyengineered,

We would need to duplicate the issue in order to log this to the development team. Please consider opening a support request for us to work directly with you on this. The Inventor reset utility does address communication issues between the OS Registry and Inventor. Is very difficult to state the actual cause and resolution since we haven't reproduced the issue.

Regards,

Don