Isolating Components for Drawings

[Anonymous]

Hi, I am having some serious and annoying problems with creating drawings. 

I have posted in the General Discussion but im starting to think its better suited here.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-general-discussion/component-isolation-for-drawings/m-p/59273...

I have a master assembly that is fully adaptable in iLogic for various sizes and configurations. I have been working on it for months (my very first assembly as I am new to Inventor). It has now come time to start creating all the shop drawings for the welders here based off my main model. I was very surprised to find out how difficult it is to just isolate a component within the assembly to make a drawing. 

I have since learned that creating a new "Level of Detail" for each component i want a drawing of is the way to go. fine. The problem I am encountering now is that when I have everything suppressed that I want in order to create a nice clean drawing (i want to create master adaptable drawing files) is that when I change some parameters through iLogic, patterns causing new or added parts to the assembly are showing up on the level of detail and now in the drawing. I have suppressed the pattern but when the pattern gets bigger it adds parts which then show up in the drawing. I do not understand why this would happen or how to correct it. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!!

Thanks

Sandro

[LukeDavenport]

Hi Sandro,

I have an addin on the Exchange App Store that does what you describe. It allows easy creation of filters to isloate components by iProperty. Each component in the BOM can be isolated also. These filtered views can then be updated with a single click and used for drawing views and parts lists.

Youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qem8o-R2mqQ

App Store: 

https://apps.exchange.autodesk.com/INVNTOR/en/Detail/Index?id=appstore.exchange.autodesk.com%3aviewr...

I hope this helps,

Luke

[Anonymous]

Hi Luke, 

Thank you so much for your response, after watching the youtube video this app seems to be the best solution to my problem yet...

Since it is not free and I will have to go through the painful process of purchasing through the company, could you please describe this to me a little better?

From the video is seems to only work off of iProperties. I do not use iProperties very often so I can't fully understand how this works. I have a few major concerns:

1. Does this app actually do anything that Inventor can't? It kind of seems like this app just makes a process that is already available easier. 

2. The video shows filters based off of properties like "thickness" or "material." This would not be useful to me. I need to be able to type in the parts name (also an iProperty?) and then have everything else turn off. 

3. How would this work in a sub-assembly? Does this app allow me to select a group of parts and only have their visibility on?

4. With the use of iLogic, my assembly is very adaptable. Will this app function properly when parts are added or removed?

I really appreciate the help..

Thanks

Sandro

[LukeDavenport]

Hi Sandro,

To answer each of your questions:

1) No the app doesn't do anything that Inventor can't. It uses view representations, which are pretty common. However it automates something that would take minutes or hours to do manually. And allows one click update of an unlimited quantity of view reps, which would be very painful to do otherwise.

2) The solution for you may be to use the 'Part Number' iProperty. By default in Inventor, this property is identical to the file name of the component (without the 'ipt'). So if you used the app to create a view rep for each value of the iProperty 'Part Number' that is found in the assembly, then you will get one view rep for each unique part in the assembly. Alternatively, if you want to filter for top level components only, you can auto-create a view rep for each row in the bill of materials (BOM) - this is shown from 4 minutes 36 seconds onwards in the YouTube video.

3) You've got a couple of choices for sub-assemblies. Either you can double click on the sub-assembly (or right click and open it) and run the app inside it to create view reps (filters) inside the sub-assembly itself, or if you want to filter from the top level only, you can click the 'All Levels' tickbox in the form, and this will filter all levels of the assembly (including sub-assemblies). It really depends whether you want to pull the BOM from each sub-assembly, or the top level assembly.

4) Yes the app is specifically designed for use in assemblies that change frequently (using iLogic for instance). There's a one-click Update button that you can hit at any time to update all the filters to reflect the latest contents of the assembly.

I hope this helps!

Luke

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the explanation. This does help!

I am not very interested in the BOM at the moment, I am still trying to wrap my head around the models and drawings in Inventor lol.

So just to be clear. If I wanted to make a drawing of a collection of parts (sub-assembly) theres no real way to do this based on part names through the app? or would filtering by the sub assembly "iam" name include all of the parts it is comprised of in the drawing?

Thanks
Sandro

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

hi all. I also posted this question on the general discussion where a solution was accepted. For better understanding please read all comments as many people gave their opinions. It can be found here..

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-general-discussion/component-isolation-for-drawings/td-p/5924...