iMates Overhaul

[MistakenEngineer]

Note: Video at bottom

Foreword
The following is a post that shows my entire idea of overhauling iMates. I've broken each section into its own idea and post but I wanted to create a master document that brings it all together to better understand everything. As such, I do not go into very much detail and will just being going over the general gist of each idea. For more detailed information click the link to the idea.

Introduction
iMates have quite a lot of promise but they have never really been developed to meet that potential. The potential benefits of iMates would allow for rapid design in middle-out and bottom-up workflows where the parts have already been created. At my company, virtually all parts have already been created and all we are doing is making assemblies out of them. Thus, after seeing the potential of iMates, I decided to make my own Add-in that unlocked the potential of iMates. However, being a mechanical engineer and having no firm education in computer science, the Add-in isn't too user-friendly and I think Autodesk would be better off implementing these ideas themselves. Furthermore, there are some ideas that have to be implemented on Autodesk's side for iMate's full potential to be released.

Smarter iMates
iMates should do more! If we are going to overhaul iMates, the first thing we need to do is to make them Smarter by adding more information to them.  The following shows a dialog of the data that should be added.

iMates should:

• Have customize-able appearances
• Change component's flexibility
• Be reusable
• Change component's view, position rep, or LOD
• Mutually exclude other iMates
  
  

My Add-in uses primitives as a placeholder for the iMate glyphs. Users can fully customize the primitives.

iMates are also linked to a components flexibility, view rep, position rep, and LOD

iMates can be reused and delete each other when another one is applied.

This is the crucial first step for overhauling iMates.

Mate by iMates Command

There needs to be a command that allows you to select the iMates to constrain instead of Alt + dragging as it has performance issues. Also, fix the performance issues with Alt + dragging iMates.

Fix "Use iMates" feature and Snap iMates Interactively

Activating the "Use iMates" command causes a huge performance issue in large assemblies. This is an annoying problem that needs to be fix and it also the interface needs to be changed. The user should be able to interactively place the iMates with their mouse instead of their keyboard.

Edit Internal iMates

This idea is just fixing another annoying problem which is that you can't edit or add iMates to composite iMate definitions.

Treat iMates like Constraints

A user should be able to do the following to iMates inside of composite iMates in the assembly environment:

• Suppress the constraint
• Modify values
• Ability to add a 3rd reference angle

Notice how in the example above, updating or rebuilding the assembly changes the iMate value back to the original value. I figured out a way around it by converting the iMate to a regular constraint.

Convert iMates Command

This command coverts iMates to regular constrains so that the values can be modified. Even if the idea of treating iMates like constrains is implemented, this idea should still be implemented.

Update Constraint Value Command

This feature is not directly linked to iMates but iMates should be considered if it is implemented. The feature changes the constraint value when it is unsuppressed so that the component doesn't move. Since we treat iMates like regular constraints as mentioned previously (the only difference being that you can't change the iMate type), when you suppress and unsuppress iMate constraints, the value should update as well.

Conclusion

Implementing these ideas will open up brand new capabilities for Autodesk Inventor and have incredible productive gains in middle-out and bottom-up design workflows. It would make assembling more intuitive and give the parts a mind of their own. Also, this took me, a mechanical engineer, a year to develop to this point so I doubt it would take the experts just as long.