Go with the [Data] Flow - The Secret to Digital Prototyping

One hundred twenty-five conceptual designers. A handful of engineers. Thousands of decision-makers. Seventy-two hours to take their input from idea to physical prototype in a trade show exhibit booth. Was this a trade-show stunt or factory of the future?

Inventor Ben Kaufman pulled off this collaborative feat at the MacWorld trade show in 2007. Outrageous or visionary, the exercise suggests the challenge of managing input and development concurrently-albeit under extreme circumstances.

For Kaufman, data flow was crucial to meeting his deadline. For more sophisticated manufacturing operations, seamless data flow is vital to understanding the aesthetics and performance of design ideas. Read more

Dependant Views and Reference Section Adjustment Issue

Description/Excerpt:
This is an issue that many people may never run into, but if you do you`ll realize it`s not fun! The problem comes about when you are using dependant views and you have reference sections pointing to another view and you modify the section mark in it`s length and/or head/tail location. If you place a reference section and say stretch it out, or need to change the head to the other side, the section will revert back to it`s original placement location (before you made any changes to it) as soon as you adjust the crop region in the dependant view. Please take a look at the attached video for a visual of the issue. This is from an actual project where the person had a lot of referenced sections. The video zooms into the dependant view so you can see the sections changing as the crop region was adjusted.

Source:
Revit ArchCenter

punching&bending cam linked with inventor 11

Description/Excerpt:
Hello everybody,

In our company we use punching and bending machines to produce sheet metal products. Our CAD software is inventor 11 and we are very satisfied. However, our CAM software for the punching and bending machines is TRUMPH`S software called TOPS 300 and TOPS 600 respectively. At the time our CAD/CAM process in the R&D department is the following. We design our assemblies in Inventor 11 and we export the drawings as dxf files. Afterwards, we use the TOPS CAM software. Therefore, when changes must occur in the inventor files we must delete the old dxf file and export a new drawing. This is a major problem because version mistakes may happen.
Does anyone know a CAM software for bending and punching machines that can be linked with inventor 11 to make the whole process more automated??

Source:
3DCADForums - Inventor Forum

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New Places in Revit 2009

Description/Excerpt:
Something new and some may overlook it, but the new Places feature takes over for the Libraries in 2008. This is a nice new feature that allows users to quickly create shortcuts in left pane of the Open, Load (Families) or creating New files (families, projects) dialogs. This area isn`t new to Revit, but how you add Places (folder shortcuts) to this area is different. Prior to 2009, you had to go into Settings->Options->File Locations and add folder locations to the Libraries area. When you did this, the locations you added were also placed in the Revit.ini file. This was great for deploying the same locations to other users. Now, in 2009 things change…just a little bit. You can still do the same process as pre-2009, but it`s labeled as Places instead of Libraries. After that though, that`s where things change.

Source:
Revit ArchCenter

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NAMED VIEWS AND LAYER VISIBILITY

Description/Excerpt:
I am having trouble using the named views dialog. I will create several viewports, move objects around in each viewport to my liking, freeze certain layers in each viewport (different layers in each one), go into named views and save each view as a named view. Now if I were to move or zoom in on an object in a certain viewport, all I would need to do is call up the named view for that viewport to get things back the way I want them. That all works fine except that the previously frozen layers will somehow thaw every time. I have tried re-freezing the layers in the current viewport and re-saving the view and using the “update layers” button, but nothing works. Perhaps it`s a system variable thing or maybe a bug that has been there forever or maybe it`s just the way I`m using it. Does anybody have any ideas?

Source:
Autodesk Discussion Forum

oblique and isometric dimensions

Description/Excerpt:
I recall in past versions- maybe 2005 or 2006- that there was a very simple way to make a 2D dimension look like an isometric without having to mess with UCS and special macros and style overrdies, but it has been awhile since I used it and I do not know if 2007 does it the same anyway. The dimension was not necesarily isometric, but it looked that way. From what I remember the last time I did this, it was a simple question of selecting the dimension (placed with the usual tools) and in some palce in the options tell it to rotate the arrowsheads and extension lines by 30 or -30 degrees. Ideas? Oh yes and for anyone who is wondering why I am asking this, I have one isometric detail on a sheet of regular 2D details. I would rather not risk messing the others up by messing with UCS or anything else just to get a few dimensions to look right.

Source:
Autodesk.com

Remove Those Flat Faces

Description/Excerpt:
This tip is more aimed at those of you that create consumer products although I am guessing several of you that don`t necessarily design consumer products will be able to take advantage of the tip. The other day I was designing something and needed to take a flat face and replace it with a slight dome. If you look at most consumer products, they often have close to planer faces although they often have a very slight dome on them that can be difficult to create. It is possible to use a “loft to point” to achieve this although I wanted a little more control. I ended up running across an interesting work flow that is very easy and gives me the look I often want. This tip has already found several great uses for me and I thought it might be of use to some of you. I will use this on a very basic box to give you an idea of the technique.

Source:
Manufacturing Community

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Tracking Components In Project That Increase File Size

Description/Excerpt:
I have a fairly simple early-schematic model. I started out by importing (linking) the autocad site plan and then working off of that. Then, it was decided that there would be two identical buildings on the site (at least for now), so I decided to link the building model into a site twice, to save on modeling time.
The problem is: after I imported the site plan, the file was loading really slowly, so I went back to the autocad drawing and discovered that it contained raster images that were turned off, making it a large file. I deleted and purged the images in the autocad file, then went back to Revit - no change, still slow loading. So I went into revit and purged decals and checked to see that there were no raster images attached. The file is still pretty large, like 27megs for a +/- 20,000sf building that has basically walls, floors and roofs, no groups, and one repeated truss family, and it is taking about 5 minutes to open.

Source:
AUGI Discussion Forum

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Variable constraint

Description/Excerpt:
I am 99% complete on this project. I just have one part that is very complex. I need a part to move one direction at a specified rotation of another part. Then it needs to move the opposite direction at another spedified rotation of the other part. In real life this would be achieved by kenetic forces since the objects would be moving in the correct direction. But Inventor does not take kenetic forces into account and in fact allows the parts to stop and move back in the opposite direction even though there are no forces or constraints causing them to change direction. So, I figure I need a mate constraint that will turn on for 1 degree of rotation and force the part to keep going in the right direction. Kind of like turning on an electro magnet for a split second to get things moving in the right direction. Then it needs to supress again for the rest of the rotation so it does not impede the progress of the rest of the movements.

Source:
MCADForums.com

Rooms - Differences Between Rb8.1 And Rb9

Description/Excerpt:
In RB8.1, you could create “rooms” in schedules without placing them. These would show up as “Not Tagged”. In RB9, you can also create rooms but they show up as “Not Placed”.In 8.1, when you tagged a space and later you decided to remove the tag, if that space was the only tagged one, Revit would ask you if you wanted to delete this space. If you chose not to, the space would show up “Not Tagged” in the schedule. Unfortunately in 9, this doesn`t seem possible. Once you “place” a room, you cannot remove it without having it removed from the schedule. I don`t like this at all and here`s why. I like to start off my projects by inputting all the programmed spaces and format the schedule to match what the program layout is (sections, groupings, order, etc.). Then we have a schedule that shows untagged spaces early in SD/DD so we can tell if we missed significant spaces. If a space gets deleted from the original program (or two spaces combined into one), we would remove the tag from the plan views, but would not delete the space in order to keep track of the changes (space shows as untagged). With the new Room object, we cannot do this anymore as once you place a room, there`s no way to “unplace” it.

Source:
AUGI Discussion Forum

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