Hi Everyone,
I am trying to make good use of the nesting add-on in Inventor but having some issues. I work for a boat builder and our next project is a small passenger ferry approx 12m long. The preliminary design is from an external designer and they have given us a 3D model of the vessel structure to further work on. The model is in Solidworks format which imports into Inventor with no problems at all. In it's current state from it stand at around 576 parts with some of those being from stock section which won't need nesting.
I am not expecting to be able to open the top level assembly and hit nest and come back 10 minutes later and pat myself on the back. However even trying to perform a much smaller nest from one of the smaller assemblies appears to take a long time.
I have been having a lot of extraction errors appear for many of the parts indicating Spline issues with some of these parts. I read that maybe converting to Sheet Metal would help this. On a similar note some of the parts have come in inverted (if a part has a hole then the the hole comes in as a solid).
I have tried manually going into a few parts and adding a sketch of the part outline and manually setting a thickness in the nest authoring window but that doesn't necessarily help. I have recorded a screencast of a nest of three parts as an example. I am aware that this only shows adding the parts to the nest file and not actually nesting them onto stock plate. Also attached are
In the video the first part comes in fine and as expected. When the second part is added the scaling and thickness of the parts goes a bit crazy. Also you will see the the orientations of the parts is off. If you see the cutting face of one part then you will see the edge of the other.
- At the moment the material for these parts is set to the Solidworks material. Does this make a difference?
- Is there anything that can be done about the extraction errors? It's a lot of parts to go through and try to correct.
- Is there a limit to the number of parts that should be added to the nest before the performance deteriorated considerably?
Any help is greatly appreciated on this.
Many thanks
Nigel
