Assembly-placing objects, aligning etc

[maxwellbests]

Hi all

 

New to inventor. Coming from the Autocad world. Needing some advice on placing parts in the assembly drawing. Getting it to look how I want it to look. Excuse my noobness, its probably been gone over before. Is there an equivalent to 3d Rotate in Inventor? What process do people use to get their assembly to look as they want it. Tried to import parts into assembly. Couldnt get the objects to line up (not planar?). Must the parts be drawn in the plane to which they will go together in the assembly? Unfamiliar with the interface, so stumbling around a bit. Thanks again.

[Laurel]

Use assembly constraints. These are a way to restrict the movement of individual parts, and, as you need here, align objects. The 'constraint...' button can be found on the 'Assembly Panel' menu, usually to the left of the drawing window.

 

I've had a quick browse and found this document (http://acad-atc.ic.polyu.edu.hk/inventor/03assem.pdf) on assembly modelling. The bottom of page 4 covers assembly constaints and looks quite easy to understand. Hope it helps.

 

I'm new to Inventor myself, but it seems a great piece of software, and well worth the effort.

 

 

 

BTW - I've reached 100 posts and am a 'Senior Member' - WooHoo!!!

[maxwellbests]

Thanks Laurel. Have gotten my head around it. Also found grip snap invaluable as well.

[Laurel]

I've never used Grip Snap. Looks very useful. Thanks.

[shift1313]

When working with assemblies you need to mate your parts using the Constraints. The standard assembly constraints are mate, angle, tangent and insert. Each one of these can have many different selections such as faces, work planes, lines or curves, points and so on. For instance if you use the mate constraint selecting two faces it will keep these faces planar. If you use the same constraint selecting two lines(say the edge of a box) it will keep thise co-linear.

 

There are also motion and transitional constraints as well as Joints in dynamic analysis. The help file in your program will explain more indepth each of these.

 

 

Also as a note the first component placed in an assembly is fixed. If you right click on the part and select Float you will "Free" this object. Any objects can be fixed or free. You can free move and free rotate parts in the assembly at any time. If you place constraints on components and there are still degrees of freedom(say a linkage assembly) you can grab the link and move it around and the rest of the assembly(properly constrainted) will move as well.

[maxwellbests]

Shift. Thanks for a great post. This is really helping me get my head around, which seems to me, to be very powerful software. I am a student of drafting, rather than being a mechanical engineer. It will be sometime before I can fully utilize this application to its max!