Many of you may already be familiar with Inventor or at least may have seen it before. It remains a very powerful tool for 3D parametric design and what Autodesk are terming as a Digital Prototyping solution.

It has recently been announced that an LT version is to be released in the UK bundled with AutoCAD LT, this will be shipping very shortly.  I have now spend a few days looking at the functionality and limitations of this product both for the manufacturing and Construction industries.

Basically, Inventor LT is intended as an entry level 3D parametric design system that will hopefully convert the people and companies that think 3D Design is difficult, time consuming or financially not cost effective. It is suitable for the smallest of companies with the occasional need for 3D design up to multi national organisations that need to supplement their existing design solutions with a parametric design system.

Inventor LT shares the same core technology for part design and 2D design as its bigger brother but does not include assembly modelling or sheet metal design. It does include the Inventor Studio module and the AEC exchange module for creating components that can be consumed by the Revit  suit of products as well as AutoCAD Architecture and

AutoCAD MEP.

In the above image I have used Inventor LT to create a parametric phone case and then used the draft analysis tool and surface analysis tools to check cross sections and for imperfections within the solids surfaces. The major benefit of this workflow is the feature history which you can use to edit and modify the design and be confident that the 2D drawing views and annotations will update automatically.

Above you can see the powerful tools within Inventor LT to create and annotate drawing views including hole tables and the ability to plan and show tolerances on dimensions. Many manufacturing and design companies will benefit from the ability to have a few seats of Inventor LT to complement their existing Inventor seats. It is certainly a more affordable way of increasing your design capability.

I also tried a few examples around Architectural design and had a go at producing something to resemble the Birds nest stadium. This was a fairly quick design that took just over one hour and allows full parametric control over the form and the 3D sketches and sweeps. This could be imported into a Revit massing family to complete the design.

Here I have produced a set of 2D drawings and a rendering from Inventor Studio for a plastic casing for a hair dryer. The above drawing is in DWG format, a great feature of Inventor.

Finally you can use Inventor LT to create content for the Revit platform, AutoCAD Architecture and AutoCAD MEP in the adsk file format. Inventor LT gives the ability to create all the necessary connectors for Ducts, Pipes and other MEP related equipment.

For more information and webinars click the following link. I will be running a series of seminars for Manufacturing and the construction industry over the web!

http://www.excitech.co.uk/news/inventor_lt_mechanical_web_seminar.asp

LawrenceH

Here at Excitech, there’s little time to attend team-building events. As you’re aware, a fairly typical session will involve a staff member falling backwards off a ladder and (hopefully) into the arms of co-workers in an effort to build mutual trust. The whole day culminates with one colleague leading the others in a heartfelt rendition of ‘Cumbaya’. At Excitech, we build teams the old-fashioned way: through work!

It’s very clear to me that no single consultant can offer the breadth of software knowledge or domain expertise to cover all disciplines, project types and data exchanges. Despite this, our clients need to exchange design data to fulfil the various requirements of all parties involved in the design and construction process.

Last week, an interoperability problem that confronted a colleague was enough of a challenge to bring us all out of ’lone-wolf consultant’ mode. I already owed him a favour for agreeing to deliver his expertise in an online ADB-Revit customer presentation earlier this month, so we both set to work on it.

According to Revit orthodoxy, the export should have gone like this:

1. Link CAD file into Revit Site (host) file.

2. Use True North and Re-locate Project Position (Manage Ribbon) to coordinate datums in host file with imported CAD file. Pin CAD file to prevent unintended displacement.

2. Acquire co-ordinates from CAD file. The Revit Site file is now geo-referenced and uses shared co-ordinates.

3. Create toposurface from imported contours or Civil 3D surface.

4. In preparation for linking each model file to the Site file, duplicate Internal Location, rename (say, Site Position A) and make current in each model (as below). In Revit, a Location stores the site position and orientation of a linked model and allows you to publish these data from one Revit file to another.

4. Link Revit Models to Site file and position these linked files correctly on site.

5. Publish coordinates to each linked model.

6. Export to AutoCAD DWG using shared co-ordinates.

7. Open in AutoCAD and Pronounce the word ‘SIMPLE’ with Meerkat intonation!

In an earlier blog, Dave Bosworth stepped us through this process (http://www.technology4design.com/?p=625) using the Revit 2010 Survey Point and Project Base Point.

At the customer site, this export didn’t work. The screen froze at 50% during the export to DWG using shared co-ordinates.  I tried the customer’s Revit file  on a test computer at Enfield and the same thing happened. Perhaps the model was too large, or maybe there were known limitations on the use of this feature. To compound this issue, we can never know exactly how the customer has adjusted the file, but we still need to fix the problem.

In collaboration, we logically reviewed alternatives to DWG export. We finally settled on the new 2010 Building Site Export feature.

1. We saved the Plan View to a separate Revit file.

2. As explained before, we opened this new file and established a new Location.

3. We inserted this file into the original and published the CAD co-ordinates into it. So, when we opened the Plan View Revit file, it displayed the correct N/E co-ordinates.

4. We exported this Revit file in ADSK Building Site format.

5. I’d like to now say that I used my extensive knowledge of Civil 3D to import the ADSK file, but I can’t. Although, I tried the Civil 3D Import Building Site feature, I could only see the Building Footprint in plan. Civil 3D is not my forte, so I asked Dave Bosworth, our Civils/GIS expert to help me out.

He indicated that I needed to customise the Building Site Style to make the Building Model visible in plan.

So thanks to everyone involved, the problem was solved. All of this proves that ‘there’s no I in TEAM’, but… I was first to blog about this, and there’s definitely an I in WINNER!