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No, You Can't Do That: Enforcing Standards with iLogic
6 Apr, 2011 By: Paul HarrisonIMAGINiT Tricks Tutorial: Use this Autodesk Inventor functionality to ensure that all your designs are compliant.
Editor's note: This tutorial courtesy of IMAGINiT Technologies.
Are you having a hard time enforcing your design group's modeling standards? In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use Inventor's iLogic functionality to make sure your designs are compliant — every time.
Why Templates?
If your design group is creating parts that are similar to one another, you can save a great deal of time by creating a "head-start" template. If every part you make starts with a rectangular extrusion, why not create a template containing the extrusion and save yourself a few minutes every day? It's easy to do this in Inventor — just model up the template you'd like to work with and navigate to Inventor's Save As menu. There, you'll find the Save Copy As Template command. This will allow you to save off your template in the appropriate location.
The Save Copy As Template command.
Building Smart Templates
Now that you've cut down on some repetitive modeling, let's take things to the next level: standards compliance. Since we're working with a common template, it's easy to embed rules in our parts that enforce our design group's standards. With a few simple clicks, we can use Inventor's iLogic technology to build "smart" templates that will alert the user to any non-compliant geometry.
Preparing the part. The first thing we'll need to do is add parameters to our parts in an intelligent way. We'll be writing rules to monitor these parameters; for instance, if a part always needs to be less than five inches in length, we'll create a rule that keeps an eye on our Length parameter. Sometimes we'll need to monitor dimensions that aren't necessarily model parameters. In this case, we'll need to create driven dimensions and monitor the associated reference parameters.
Let's take a look at an example. I'd like to create a template for the adapter fitting seen here, which changes dimensions based on the fitting and plate sizes.
Adapter assembly.
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