Drawings & Multi-Body iPart

[Anonymous]

I've been working on a project that involves fasteners.  For the sake of discussion, imagine a very special Nut and Washer combination where all their "specialness" is in the mating components of the two parts, and each washer is specific to each nut.  Because there are so many dependent dimensions between the two pieces and so many variations (every metric and SAE standard fasteners size plus many special ones) an iParrt has proven a robust want to model this pair - I only have about 60 rows at present but will very likely end up with something like 400 rows.

The struggle comes every time I have to produce shop drawings.  Each piece can be sufficiently detailed on one sheet, and everything works fine for the first part I set up.  I use Solid Body Visibility to only show the part I need and away I go.  Trouble is, If I make a new drawing as a copy of an existing one and then change to another iPart, the Visibility checkboxes no longer produce any effect.  They act like they are going to, but they do nothing.

I have tried View Representations that isolate each part which would be a perfect solution, but of course it does not work in the Drawing environment for some unknown-to-me reason.

It is a big waste of my time to have to keep redrawing these things every time - I am seeking other workflows that might be more reliable. Because there are so many special cases, dimension tables are not a good option.  Any other suggestions?

[Anonymous]

Swalton,

The design views do not carry over into the child parts. I keep my parent part in the Master view. The child parts also do not let you make their own design views (see image).

 

I think you are right that design views are not involved with iparts. I suppose they would need to be to make the original post workflow to work also?

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Jacob,

Unfortunately, this workflow is not yet supported. You will need to use Make Components command to push the solids into individual parts in an assembly. Then control the visibility in an assembly and document as such.

Many thanks!

[chris]

If I'm not mistaken, this is not a big deal for a 1-2 page drawing with just a few views on each page... but if you are doing a 10-40 page weldment drawings where you are also calling out each welded piece and showing their details this could turn into a nightmare... manually managing each placed view to only show a single solid body. Also if a new part is placed into the weldment or a new solid body is created after the fact, you would then need to go into all drawing pages, all views and manually turn off the visibility of the newly created part or body... seems like a hard workflow?

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Chris,

The workflow issue here is specific to iPart MSB, not general MSB. From my perspective, iPart is an out-of-context configuration tool. It means the iParts should be well-defined and geometrically similar. Inventor MSB workflow is targeting assembly design requiring a lot of in-context geometric relationship. The end result should always be an assembly with parts deriving from the MSB skeleton part. Certainly, MSB part can be used as a part. iPart was not designed to be the MSB configurator.

It looks like iPart lacks the ability to control solid body visibility. It may be a good idea to submit to Inventor Ideas forum.

Many thanks!

[chris]

That would be a good idea, to bad the concept of iPart and the ability to present various MB within them can't be combined with iLogic parts, so we could just have one format. A configured iLogic part with the ability to "maintain" variants, whether that be sizes or the ability to present various MB's would be uber powerful. I always liked the SW toolbox/configurable parts... as they stay live the entire time but can each be different sizes.