Hi all,
Could someone please point me in the right direction (or directions!) for generating a Parts List with columns for LENGTH, WIDTH and THICKNESS which are auto populated with values from the parts?
* While writing this post I have come across some other forum threads and the most useful of which (in my view) I have pasted the links to bellow.
I'll still post this thread however in case there is any more guidance out there on top of or in conjunction to those threads (in particular the iLogic they suggest as this seems to be the most likely route of enquiry ). Thank you.
Use example of us:
I have a piece of timber joinery of an MDF or Plywood frame made up of numerous panels of varying shapes and sizes.
This has been made as a multi body part (because that must be the most robust way to do it given there is a lots of chopping and changing as the design progresses).
I have then turned this into separate parts in a new assembly by selecting … Manage > Make Components.
So now I can at least generate a Parts List for all the panels!
What I would now like is some efficient work flow to capture those extents dimension and pull them into the Parts List. Pressing a buttons to auto generate your cut list would be the Holy Grail!! 😊
One caveat / work flow I don’t want:
I have seen from searching online some talk about creating reference dimensions, naming them LENGTH, WIDTH, THICKNESS so as to become Custom Parameters, checking the parameters for export and then setting the column in the Parts List to look for said parameters.
However that is surely extra manual work!
I would sooner take the dimensions from my 2D drawings (of the assembly - which I have to do anyway!) and manually generate the cut list in Excel rather than this extra time consuming step of creating reference dims, parameters for each and every extents dimension in every part.
If there are hundreds of unique panels this could take ages!
Also in my line of work (bespoke furniture) there is no future benefit to generating fancy links/references (as the furniture will not change that much once it gets to the cut-lis stage) so you're better off doing it manually if a quick auto way does not exist.
Couple of useful related threads:
Main take-home from this is the reference / user parameters route. Although @jtylerbc mentions a tantalising iLogic rule??
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-forum/part-minimum-dimensions-iproperties/td-p/7505524
This has an interesting iLogic rule by @Curtis_Waguespack that in his words "Then in the resulting assembly [produced from a 'master' multi-body part] I would create an iLogic rule and paste in the code below and run the rule, which will step into each part
and write custom iproperties for the length width and thickness of each part."
This could be what I am looking for although apparently the only limitation of this code is that if a part is on the skew to the xyz plane then it will take the max dimensions but still in the xyz rather than true to the face of the panel. But to be honest in most cases for myself, most panels will be at 90 degrees to each other (i.e. along xyz) so that will probably be fine 'in most cases'.
Any further thoughts / advice?
Thank you.
