Selecting/Editing patterned components = Frustrating

[CamperUnhappy]

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.

[SharkDesign]

I know what you mean about editing patterns, if you pattern a pattern you need to expand the top pattern and then double click one of the ones under it

[3D4Play]

I know what you mean about patterns - if you create one and you need to change visibility in the drawing you must

select

each

one

and

change

it's

visibility

settings

one

at

a

time,

which pretty much sucks because you can suppress an entire pattern by right clicking and suppressing. It does not work the same for

changing

visibility

on

individual

patterned

elements.

It's even worse when you can't "select all instances" without knowing the secret dancing with hoops code.

[Eric.Muetz]

The best solution to this dump inventor for something that is meant to be used by professionals.  Try Solid Edge.  Ask me how I know.