Examining a Model for Best Practices in Inventor 2013

From time to time, you may receive other people’s models for purposes of modification. The other user may be on vacation, backed up on a job or otherwise unavailable.

Whatever the reason, a common practice for 3D modeling is examining relationships before beginning modification to ensure the proper changes take place in the model based on your change intent.

Inventor 2013 makes this process a bit easier with two enhanced features: the Sketch Icon and the End of Part Marker enhancement.

Sketch Icon
When examining a model in 2013, you can instantly tell whether a sketch is fully constrained or not by the look of the icon in the consumed feature or the Shared Sketch that it uses.

First take a look at an unconstrained sketch below. We are missing a value for the radius on the upper curve to fully constrain this sketch in relative position. Notice the icon for the sketch looks exactly the way it has in the past.

Now, once we fix this dimension snafu, we can now see the icon for the sketch has changed to have a pin on the sketch showcasing that it is fully constrained in position.

End of Part Toggle
This one is a little enhancement aimed at larger models. Typically, we can move the End of Part Marker manually by dragging it to a specified area of the model tree. Now, we can right click on a feature and move it to that area without selecting and dragging it first.

Once we are done with the marker movement, we can then move it back to the End or to the beginning by right clicking on the toggle.

This allows us to examine relationships as they were created in history and also view what would happen if we inserted a feature into the tree at an earlier time. So, when it comes time to make adjustments to the model, we can do so confident that our model will update in an expected manner even if we are not the user that originally created it.
www.imaginit.com

Mark Flayler is an application engineer with IMAGINiT Technologies, specializing in manufacturing environments. and is PSE and ATC certified in AutoCAD, AutoCAD Mechanical, AutoCAD Electrical, Autodesk Data Management, and Autodesk Inventor.