Enhanced Multi-Body Mirroring in Inventor 2016

There’s a new Inventor 2016 enhancement, which I accidentally discovered during a recent Inventor class. I don’t remember reading about this, but here it is listed in the new Inventor 2016 features:

This is a subtle enhancement, but extremely useful if you do any multi-body modeling in the Inventor Part Environment.

In previous Inventor versions, you could only mirror one solid body at a time. For example, to mirror the six solid bodies in the image below, you’d have to run the mirror command six times (once for each solid body). Of course, that method would result in six individual features and lots of extra mouse-clicking.

However, Inventor 2016 now allows you to select multiple solids as part of the same mirror command…yay! One command, one feature, but multiple solid bodies being mirrored at the same time.

The only caveat is, (and this is how I accidentally discovered this enhancement) once you’re done selecting the solid bodies to be mirrored, you have to click on the Mirror Plane button before you select a plane to mirror about.

Before you click OK to complete the mirror feature, don’t forget to select the New Solid or Join button (in the top right of the dialogue box) to tell Inventor whether to create new solid bodies or join them with the original ones.

So, there you go. Next time you want to mirror some solid bodies, mirror them all at once.

For more Inventor tips and tricks, check out IMAGINiT Manufacturing Solutions Blog.

Jeff Stueck is an applications expert for the manufacturing solutions division at IMAGINiT Technologies.