When working with large assemblies and components that repeat a lot, I use a lot of patterns in order to speed up the assembly process. However, the thing that I always find is that while I'm refining the design or drawings, I often need to change properties or view reps of all of these items and I'm just no able to make the necessary changes in an assembly without deleting the pattern, making edits, then re-patterning the components again. This makes the process a complete nightmare to work like this especially if I already have a drawing started because annotations or dimensions that were attached to these components become broken.
The other thing that I'm missing from software like Advance Steel and Revit is the ability to select All Instances of a very specific object. When I try to use the current "select all instances" tool from the right-click menu, ALL occurrences of this object are selected no matter what model-state they are set to. I know Model States is still young, but there needs to be the ability to discriminate between instances of the same file as a high-level selection......and actually being able to select ONLY instances that are an exact match for what is selected.
And going back to working with Patterns.... it would be amazing if we could disable having the entire pattern highlight when use the "component" selection filter. I pretty much never want to select the entire pattern...... I'm trying to select a sub-assembly inside of a pattern. So in order to do so, I have to switch to "part selection", select the part, then find the part in the browser, then select it's parent which is the sub-assembly that I was trying to select in the first place. Too many steps to get to the end result. Things like this need to be easier.
It seems as though Inventor is just designed to be used as a single-part creator and a finished-part assembler. Unfortunately, as a top-down designer at an engineering firm that every job is basically a brand new design, this makes Inventor a very cumbersome and frustrating experience......especially when my clients revise a design or want me to put together a multiple concepts for them to decide between.
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