Patterns of operations exported from multi-body part to single part

[Anonymous]

Arrays of operation give us a a lot of benefits, especially when you use them in assemblies. For ex. patterns of 100 holes in part can be used in assembly to insert 100 shafts in two operations.

1) Insert shaft in one hole

2) Pattern that shaft to the holes, by selecting hole pattern from the part.

All that benefits are lost when you use a part exported from multi-body part. In such an exported part you can't select patterns used in multi-body part.

Instead of inserting parts separately with separately constrains, from my experience, when you insert parts with pattern, Inventor works much mor faster with large assemblies.
Also such a technique improves work a lot and helps to save a lot of time

It would be very useful if Inventor could export pattern information to part from multi-body part.

[ambrose]

Yes! I've been meaning the suggest this for ages, thank you. This would be a great time saver.

I have a couple of workarounds that I use in the meantime.

The more manual but slightly cleaner workaround goes as follows. You mark the appropriate parameters for export e.g. no of instances and spacing. You then import these parameters into the assembly either directly from the multi-body part, or if you prefer, from the sub part if you import the parameter there first. Then you manually setup the pattern in the assembly, using the imported parameters. That way it will update automatically if you change the pattern, and you will have the performance benefit of patterns over separate instances. It is annoying to have to do this, but the end result is pretty robust.

Another workaround which I came up with more recently is to import the multi-body part into the assembly in addition to the individual parts. Then you can use the original multi-body part to create feature-based patterns in your assembly. This is not as messy as it sounds. If you open the bill of materials (BOM) in the assembly and set the multi-body part to "Phantom" it will not appear in part lists. Once you have your patterns setup, you can turn off visibility of the multi-body part, or suppress it if you prefer.

[DRoam]

Please consider voting for this idea as well (requests the same thing): Improvements to iParts, Multi-body, and Derived Parts.