Using AutoCad in Inventor, or Inventor in AutoCAD?

[ecshclark]

I'm trying to determine the best way to combine 2D AutoCad floorplan drawings and Inventor part & assembly drawings. I am currently laying out video walls for multiple clients. Combined there are hundreds to thousands of branches nationwide. I recieve a .dwg file of a building's floor plan. I have been creating an AutoCAD drawing using the floor plan to show the location of the video wall and other equipment. In Inventor, I make an installation drawing that shows the elevation and assembly of the video wall. What I end up with, is two drawings (or you could say two sheets), each done in a different CAD program. I would like to have both sheets in one file and program. I have investigated a number of ways to do this. But I am just not sure what would be the most efficient. I could bring the Inventor stuff into AutoCad and do both sheets there, but I would prefer to have both drawings in Inventor. Does anyone have any experience similiar to this? Any suggestions?

Edited August 6, 2010 by ecshclark

[Mike_Taylor]

I don't know if this is the route you will want to go, but you can simply import you AutoCAD drawings into Inventor, simply put them into a separate sheet. This will put all the drawing you have into one .idw file. Again, I'm not 100% sure what exactly you are trying to do, but those are my 2 cents. I have not used Inventor in close to 3 months now, and can not remeber exactly how to do this (I believe its simply a copy and past or import) but i can get onto my home computer with inventor and find out for you.

[Pablo Ferral]

I have found it easier to deal with 2D Inventor drawing views in Autocad than bringing 2D information from Autocad into Inventor. If you are trying to amalgamate 3D information, then I would do this inside Inventor.

 

2D Inventor information is held inside a DWG file as an Autocad Block, so once you have created your view you can use the 'INSERT' command to add the views into the Autocad part of the drawing. The Inventor views, and the Autocad blocks will update every time you open and save the drawing in Inventor.

 

You can keep the inventor file and the Autocad file separate, and insert view blocks from the Inventor DWG file into the Autocad DWG file - but then the link will be broken and the view blocks won't update.

 

You could try XREFs!

 

Have a look at this post:

http://inthemachine-autodesk.typepad.com/blog/2010/08/just-helping-out.html

 

and this one:

http://inthemachine-autodesk.typepad.com/blog/2010/08/just-helping-out.html