Greetings everyone,
I'm looking for some outside opinions on whether or not there's a more efficient way of designing & developing this Shipping Crate Generator that I put together a few months ago. Since I'm an upcoming self-taught Inventor user, I'm hoping that some of you more seasoned experts may have suggestions of a better way for me to go about my little project here.
A little background info about what I'm doing - I create models & shop drawings of shipping crates for shipping curtain wall units to various skyscraper job sites that my company is working on, and I'm looking to automate my processes wherever I can. I developed this Shipping Crate Generator and some semi-automated shop drawing files using a mix of iPart factories, iLogic rules, forms & VBA macros. I chose to use iParts partly because of the crate modeling process that was established before I came on-board at this company, and also because crating lumber has a finite number of profiles & lengths.
Currently, the Shipping Crate Generator uses iPart factories for generating its lumber components. Lumber comes in a finite number of profiles & lengths, so iParts felt like an appropriate solution for generating these crates. I've customized the iPart tables via Excel so that the lumber components' iProperties are used to populate the accompanying shop drawings. It's not 100% complete, but it's come quite a long way and has easily cut down my work time by one-half.
For each project, we need to generate multiple crate types to house the curtain wall units' varying sizes. To create a new crate, I need to make copies of the master .IAM & .IDW files that are used to produce the images that you see below. For an individual project, I only need to go through a bout of resolving links once; after I do that, I can make copies of that project's master crate files to generate crate models & drawings for every combination of curtain wall units that we need to ship.
It looks all well and good, but it takes ~2-4 minutes for a crate model to update & rebuild itself after it's fed the curtain wall units' dimensions. I believe this is primarily due to how slow Inventor can be when swapping out iParts; since the entire crate is made up of iParts (234 total occurrences, ~37 individual components used for just the crate model itself). Also, it relies on an ever-growing library of iPart models, which I can imagine would cause some slow-down. It works well, though, so I can't complain that much about it; I just can't help but feel that maybe I'm doing things the "hard" way.
I've recently learned about Frame Generators in Inventor, but I don't know if that'd be a viable solution to my crate modelling problem. I've made a test model of a crate fence using the Frame Generator feature and it updates VERY quickly when I feed it new dimensions, but there are a LOT of files & folder structures involved in creating a Frame Generator assembly. From what I've learned thus far, I'd have to copy & re-associate an entire folder's worth of wireframes, frame boxes, Frame member sub-folders, etc. just to create a new shipping crate model. Though the performance of a Frame-Generated shipping crate model is almost instantaneous, I don't know that it's worth all of the up-keep.
How would you guys approach such a problem? Are iParts the way to go for this kind of thing? Is there an easier way to produce replications of a master Frame Generator model without all of the upkeep & file management? Or is there another Inventor tool/work process that I'm unaware of that'd be more applicable to this problem?
Sorry for the wall of text, but I figured it'd be more useful to you guys if I give you the scope of what I'm trying to address and what I've done to get to where I am. I've done a fair bit of looking around, but I haven't found anything that addresses my problem with needing multiple copies of the same semi-automated model & drawing files that aren't associated to one another. Thanks in advance for any pointers, and I hope to hear from you guys soon!
- Sincerely,
Vincent Fantini
