Description
Key Learnings
- Discover the broader uses of Factory Design Suite software.
- Discover why other industries would consider Factory Design Suite.
- Learn how to identify designs that could utilize Factory Design Suite, other than factories.
- Investigate asset publishing for layout design.
Speaker
- Charles BelcherRusty Belcher is a manufacturing application expert and senior consultant with IMAGINiT Technologies. He provides implementation, training, and support services for all Autodesk, Inc. manufacturing products. Rusty specializes in integrating 3D design practices into manufacturing production environments. He also works with reality capture laser scanning and photogrammetry to document real-world objects, translating them into viable 3D CAD designs. As an outstanding instructor and mentor, Rusty consistently receives excellent reviews for his impact at IMAGINiT Technologies. Rusty began his career as a structural steel fitter at Newport News Shipbuilding. He is a graduate of the Newport News Shipbuilding Apprentice School and worked in the shipyard's Mold Loft Engineering Division. Since joining IMAGINiT Technologies in 2000, Rusty has been dedicated to supporting the Autodesk Manufacturing solutions. In recent years, his primary focus has been on the Autodesk Factory Design Utilities. Rusty collaborated directly with Autodesk to develop and author the original Factory Design Suite software training courseware and has created numerous tips and tutorial videos available on the Factory Design Suite software’s YouTube channel. He is also a regular presenter at the acclaimed Autodesk University, where he frequently receives outstanding reviews.
RUSTY BELCHER: One of the things that I've done in the past just to get things started is to give you something to look at and hopefully see some of the stuff we're going to be looking at during the class. There is bonus points if you can tell me what the music's to.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
All right, don't let the word "factory" get in the way. We're going to be talking about the broader uses of the Factory Design Utilities. Anybody know the music? Help me out.
AUDIENCE: Metal gear solid.
RUSTY BELCHER: Metal Gear-- oh man, I wish. No. Bit old school, bit gray in my beard. That was Johnny Quest. That was the 1980 redo of Johnny Quest, so sorry.
That was kind of cheating there. There's a website you can go to which says any television episode sounds better with Johnny Quest as the theme song. It's amazing, it really is true. It's really good.
So my name's Rusty Belcher. I am an application engineer. I work with IMAGINiT technologies. They're a reseller. I focus on the manufacturing side of things and the past eight, nine years, the thing that's kind of dominated my life is the Factory Design Utilities.
When the Factory Design Utilities first came out I was really fortunate to work directly with Autodesk and do a lot of the first marketing videos for the Factory Design Utilities. Got a chance to write the first manual, the first course files, for the Factory Design Utilities. So I've been working with it for quite a while, and I really am looking forward to you guys putting your hands on it today. This is, as far as I know, I think this is the first hands on for factory utilities at AU.
Every year it's always been seminars or demos or things like that. But this year they asked me to do a hands on lab, so we're going to give it a go. I have taught this class before. Some of you may have sat through it as a demo. But I've always wanted to let you guys try it for yourself and make sure that you can see how easy it actually is to do yourself.
I've got some great lab assistants today. I've got Pete Markovic in the back, Ron Jones and Steve Olson. And they're going to be helping us out. Three lab assistants for 30 people, 40 people. That's a pretty good ratio. So if you have questions, raise your hand, make sure you signal them.
I mentioned earlier in the preliminaries that the first thing we need to do is get our class set up. There are some other learning objectives. This is a typical learning objectives slide. We'll be looking at the broader aspects of the Factory Design Utilities. We'll look at what other industries, other than factory owners, who else could be utilizing the Factory Design Utilities?
If you are a factory owner, don't worry. We're going to be showing you the benefits of the Factory Design Utilities. We're going to identify designs that could be put together utilizing the Factory Design Utilities. And we're going to investigate asset publishing which is one of the key cornerstones of the factory design workflow.
All right, so I want to thank the guys who set the class up because they've already got your first step done. They've already gone in and they've extracted your data sets. How many of you have done hands on classes so far at AU? Has everyone done a hands on, or is this your first one? If it's your first one, on the little desktop, I'll tell you right away, stay away from the Windows button. Just use the little desktop.
On the desktop, I believe you can browse out. There's a datasets folder. In the datasets folder, you'll find my name, Rusty Belcher. And there is a folder, MFG138050L class files. Not the zip file. But if you go in there you'll find the class files.
If you go inside the class files, you'll see the main three folders we're going to ask you to go in and look for today. You're going to see the connector classes, the expanded demo, and the HD-- I'm sorry, FDU hands on. I'll tell you when to go into each one and I'll tell you what they're for as we go through. So they've already extracted the files. Does everybody see those files? Everybody's got those things extracted. I really appreciate Autodesk for getting this stuff set up for us.
All right, next up we want to open Inventor. So go ahead and launch your Inventors. I mentioned earlier that I came in last night into the room and checked out things and I was tickled to death. Autodesk did a great job setting this up. But I noticed it took a little while for Inventor launch. So go ahead and get that thing up and running right now.
When your Inventor gets up and running, kind of give me a wave just to say, hey it's its up, it's ready to go. You know, I'm there. I don't want to move too far along and leave anybody behind on this. Want to take about 15 minutes to get this stuff set up so we can use the rest of the class to explore the functionality.
Got it? Good deal. That's the hard part, getting the thing turned on, right? All right I'm going to switch back and forth between the computers here for just a minute. Sorry, make sure I get this right.
So while your Inventor is up and running, our first task is to set up a project file. I wish I could have this stuff automatically done for you. But hey, this is Inventor. You get to learn as you go. So a project file allows Inventor to focus on the data that it needs when it needs it.
When I say file open, I don't want Inventor looking at my entire X drive with gigs and gigs of data. I want it to look at the X drive, and my project file, and my directories that have just my data in it. You Save a lot of resources that way. It's like putting blinders on a horse and narrowing its focus to just the data that it needs to see.
So if you've never created a project file in Inventor, it's not difficult. If you like exploring while I'm talking, that might cause a little issue. You can't have any files open when you go to make a project file in Inventor. So if you've opened up a file, you want to close that. But on the Inventor, on the Getting Started tab, there is a button up here called Projects.
Click the Project tool and you'll see a dialog line. It's going to look a little bit different. You guys are seeing my laptop and I've got a bunch of projects up there. In the projects dialog, you're going to come down to the bottom. There's two windows here. Come down to the bottom and click on the New button.
There are really two kinds of projects. There's Vault projects, which we all should be using, and single user projects which is what we're doing today. Want to temporarily focus on some stuff that has nothing to do with my stuff that's in the Vault. This is a standalone little project that we're working on. So we're going to use a single user project. That should be the default that's set up.
Go ahead and click Next. The name can be anything you want, and please don't type in "anything you want." I've seen that one. That's a good one. Type in something like, FDUAU, Factory Design Utilities Autodesk University, something like that.
Now here's the hard part. The next line down is your workspace. The workspace is the main folder that holds all of your data. I always call it like the star on the Christmas tree. Everything else about that tree is below the star. So the workspace is typically where you want to work.
At the end of that little cell, you can click the ellipsis button. I call it the Browse button. And you're going to browse to that data set area on your computer. You're going to go out to your C drive, or-- help me out, guys-- I think it's, is it a temporary folder? Temporary storage, or something like that? I can show you up here.
All right, C drive, shortcut data sets. You're going to go to the data sets area. What is it? D? D, Datasets, thank you. Yep, you're going to go to datasets, find my name, and then you can go inside of that file, the manufacturing course files.
If you guys bear with me just a second on mine. I'm going to make sure. I'm going to try to set my machine up like yours. So on my machine now I can get mine set up under Projects. I'll click New, Single User, Next, FDUAU, browse, out to that dataset area, Rusty Belcher and then the MFG138050-L class files.
So once you go into that directory, just click it. Just go into that directory and then click OK. That's where our workspace is going to be. After you click OK, you can select Finish and this project should be listed in your available project file. You should see a little check beside it.
I just went to the manufacturing folder. If you put it in the class files, it's not going to hurt anything. That's no problem. Just remember where you're working for future, OK? So as far as the project file goes, hopefully we've got that one done. Now we could use the assets that Autodesk gives you with the factory utilities. I will show you those. But anybody from Autodesk in here?
If I say that they're pretty simple and they're all factory oriented and I want to talk about things that are not factories, I'm not knocking the assets. Just, I want to give you assets, that one of the big benefits of the Factory Design Utilities is you can make your own asset. You don't have to use the library that's provided.
So the next goal is to copy the assets from the dataset and get them installed into your system. To do this, you're going to do the first part of this on your computer. You can close the little project directory and you can minimize Inventor, get to your desktop, and use Windows to browse to the data sets. You're going to go into the MFG folder, the manufacturing folder. Go into the Class Files folder.
And you'll find a folder called FDU Hands On. Go into that folder, highlight all of these directories, and right click and select Copy. All I did is go into the FDU hands on folder, highlighted all those directories, right click Copy. If I make assets as the project manager, this is how easy it is to pass it out to everyone in the organization. It can be easier than this, but it's fairly easy to copy paste assets from one computer to the next.
So in Inventor-- let's go back over to Inventor. I want to go to the Factory tab. The Factory Design Utilities is something that you install after you install Inventor. With the new landscaper products that we install, you install Inventor, install AutoCAD, install Navisworks, 3D Studio, whatever's in the collection that you have access to. Install the main tools first. The last thing you want to install, or next to the last thing, is the Factory Design Utilities.
Usually Vault brings up the rear. The Vault tools come up last, all right? So the Factory Design Utilities and Vault the last two things you install. And this is what gives you the tab. The tab shows up in AutoCAD, it shows up in Navisworks, it shows up in Inventor.
The very first button on the tab is called New Layout. So go ahead and launch that. If you're an Inventor user, a layout is an assembly. It's an IAM. When you look at it in Inventor in file format, it's an IAM file. You'll notice that when it pops up, this is probably the first file you're opening, it's going to go a little slow on your machines.
But when it pops up the thing that distinguishes it is a floor, a floor will appear automatically, or a ground plane, whichever way you want to call it. If you're a ship builder you can call it a deck or a platform. If you're doing skyscrapers, this could be the 40th floor. I know this has taken a little while. It's a little slow but let it let it catch up with you.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS] --till the trial is over.
RUSTY BELCHER: Oh, man.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
RUSTY BELCHER: I checked out on the back machines yesterday so I know, the one right through the door I set down. I know those were working yesterday. All right, so everybody see a floor? I know some of you got some issues but does everyone else see a floor? Everybody got that?
OK, now there's a couple of other things that pop up with the Factory Design Utilities. The first one we want to look at, on the very first button on the ribbon is called the palettes button. You guys have used the Inventor browser forever. Well, there are other browsers that you can use with the factory utilities. I want you to click the Asset browser.
Now your Asset browser might float out here in space first. I'll be honest, that's the way factory has worked forever. Or your Asset browser might automatically dock to the new 2018 browser. The browsers are now stackable.
On the Asset browser, you'll see some folders-- System Assets, User Assets, User Cloud Assets, Favorites, Search. You're going to right click on User Assets and select Explore. This will take you to the directory where your user assets are installed. I've already got a ton of them. Yours should be blank.
When you see that blank directory, this is a Windows directory. When you see that blank directory, right click in that directory and select Paste. You're going to pace those assets that you copied into this area. This is your local library for user assets.
I've already got my assets installed on my laptop. And again, I could right click and select Paste. They should pop in. Those assets contain, I think they contain meshes, they contain solid models, they contain point clouds, all kinds of stuff. So it might take a few seconds for it to paste that information over there.
An asset can be anything, any model that you've created or downloaded. If it's a parametric model you'd need to create those in Inventor, but you can incorporate parameters. Point clouds, meshes-- I offered a class this year, how to take Google SketchUp up and make assets out of it. I can do that now with Inventor in the latest releases.
Appreciate everybody helping out your neighbor. That's awesome. Gotcha, excellent.
AUDIENCE: AutoCAD?
RUSTY BELCHER: What did I miss?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
RUSTY BELCHER: Gotcha.
AUDIENCE: You can find the Explorer.
RUSTY BELCHER: You right click, yeah. In the browser, in the Asset browser, right click on User Assets, the little folder. Select Explore, it will open up the window. All right, now you got some good assets. I created them so I'm not going to praise myself too much, but they're pretty cool assets.
You can close that window, that little Windows Explorer window, once you've pasted that stuff in there. And just so you don't have to do it later, there's this little recycle button. There's this little recycle button on the asset browser. Since you've added new assets, go ahead and click that an it will re-tally the display of the browser and it'll accommodate those new assets into the directory. you'll see the icons up there appear.
All right, I've got one more thing and then we'll set up those finished. It's very similar to what we just did. In your Windows environment, if you go back to the directory where you copied this stuff earlier-- you can go back up a level or you can browse back out to the data sets. There is a folder called Connector Classes. Open up that folder and you'll see, these are XML files.
These XML files say things like length equals length, width equals width, height equals height, truck color equals truck color. Fairly straightforward to create, but it does take some time to create these. Inventor uses these when two assets, two like assets, meet together, it passes the parameters from one to the new one. So the width of the conveyor automatically transfers to the width of the new conveyor. Saves you so much time if you include connector classes.
We're going to highlight all these. Right click Copy. Now there's a very specific place these need to go. Anyone who wants to utilize these, they have to have these installed locally. In Windows, you can browse out to your C drive, and you need to go to the program data folder.
I noticed, I couldn't see the program data folder. So if you click up here on this level, you'll see C backslash. If you click there, and you can type in P-R-O, and you'll see program data. You can select it there. If you don't see it, you need to get to program data. Good?
AUDIENCE: No.
RUSTY BELCHER: OK. It's all right.
AUDIENCE: I might have turned this thing [INAUDIBLE]. Because first of all, we're here now.
RUSTY BELCHER: What was the last thing you did?
AUDIENCE: Just put this up.
RUSTY BELCHER: OK, you're good. Minimize Inventor. And let's go to-- I want to go up one level for me.
AUDIENCE: Oh, all right.
RUSTY BELCHER: And you're already there for me. Go to your data storage. Sorry,
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] Storage?
RUSTY BELCHER: Datasets. Rusty Belcher, and Manufacturing, Class Files, Connector Classes. Copy all those. There you go, right click Copy. Now you can just click up in this. Go to the C drive, click up here in the cell.
AUDIENCE: Right here?
RUSTY BELCHER: Yep, just click one time. Just click one time up there in the C drive.
AUDIENCE: OK. And then one time and paste?
RUSTY BELCHER: No, just click one more time. Now type in P-R-O-G, or program. See, it's right there, program data.
AUDIENCE: OK.
RUSTY BELCHER: So you're right with me. So once you get to program data, you're going to go to the Autodesk subfolder. Good old Autodesk. In the Autodesk subfolder, you're going to find Factory Design 2018-- Factory Design 2018. And then there's a Factory Library folder.
There is another folder there called Connector Classes. And you're going to right click and paste those classes in there. If it says you're going to overwrite some files, that's fine. Go ahead and overwrite them. And that's it, that finishes the class set up once you get that done.
So now you've seen the guts of the thing. There are some subdirectories that support Factory Design Utilities. You've seen those things. I wish I could have had that set up for you, but it's the nature of the class. I couldn't do that. But there you go. You've got your class set up.
Now we can jump back into Inventor. Took a little longer than I wanted, so again this is a fluid thing. I'm going to try to share with you certain bits of information on this with the Factory Design Utilities. So I'm going to forward on into my presentation. I've already mentioned the fact that I don't want to let the word factory get in the way.
How many times I've met with customers and they say, factory utilities? And we don't do factories here. That's the wrong piece of software for me. No, no, the factory utilities offers a lot to everyone. That's my hashtag for the class, FDU4Everything.
So the broader uses of the tool-- I'll give you a little story real quick. I remember the first time I saw the Factory Design Utilities. The project manager at the time, nine years ago, at Autodesk in a super secret session because they couldn't let anybody see it, showed me the Factory Design Utilities. I was going to do some marketing work and they were giving me a copy of it.
And he showed me these assets snapping together. He showed me these parameters propagating from one asset to the next. And I was amazed. It was really cool. Never seen Inventor do this stuff before.
He asked me, after his little brief demo he said, what do you think? I said two things. I said one, that's awesome. And the second thing I said, had to be critical, I said, why did you name the Factory Design suite?
This is how I want to build ships. This is how I want to build mechanisms. I want to use this. This is blocks for AutoCAD. How can I have AutoCAD without blocks? Well now Inventor has that same kind of asset-based functionality.
Anyone can use this. Did you guys see in the keynote yesterday, they talked about that putting the neighborhoods together with preset standardized components that snap together automatically and the computer can basically build houses and neighborhoods with generative design? Assets that's all built on this asset approach.
Real quick I'll give you a little, I don't know, the past couple of years of my life. I work with many different customers beyond factory owners. I've done projects with command and control centers, computer network server farms. Had a lady call me up, she uses Inventor to create children furniture for preschoolers.
She's using Inventor to make these amazing little preschool furniture's components, but she needs to keep putting them in different classroom layouts across the country so that she could package up the data, send it out, and they could lay out the room. So she's laying out the rooms in Factory Design Suite using her designs, basically doing interior design work for schools all over the country. The first time I demoed Factory, I did it for a supermarket chain who wanted to use it for laying out supermarkets.
I've worked with some pretty high end retailers. I won't tell you who they were. But chances are you're wearing some of their jeans right now. Their point of sale in their malls and their stores all across the world, they wanted to take a look at laying out their stores with standardized components.
I live in Virginia. I live on the east coast of Virginia and surrounded by shipyards. I grew up in a shipyard. That's where I did my apprenticeship. Shipbuilders have embraced the Factory Design Utilities, probably because they mostly worked with me. But to build ships-- I mentioned I wanted to build ships this way.
Event venues-- one time event venues are going to drastically change. This is the Bristol Motor Speedway. They had a football game this year called the Battle at Bristol. And they had needed to change their venue from a NASCAR racetrack to a football stadium. It was a great use of the Factory Design Utilities, or could have been.
I mentioned shipbuilders. Newport News Shipbuilding where they build the aircraft carriers, I've Demoed this there. They've adopted quite a bit of that. Portsmouth Naval shipyard, where they house a lot of the submarine fleet, we did a presentation up there, showed them the same ship building capabilities. I've gotten a chance to work with some exhibitors, the guys who put together the exhibit floor and all the televisions that you see outside. They're looking at this now to build exhibit spaces with standardized components.
Electrical substations had a huge project. I ran to one of my customers yesterday and there's actually something now called the Substation Design Suite. Guess what it's built on? It's built on the factory design processes. And I taught a class yesterday about using point clouds as assets, or real, reality enabled, assets layout. It all kind of comes together with the Factory Design Utilities.
I don't actually-- honestly, every once in a while I get to work with a factory owner. But predominantly I work with people who don't own factories and they use the Factory Design Utilities. So let's take a look at why. What does the Factory Design Utilities offer that other industries are interested in? You've already seen the floor.
All right, you've seen this already. So on your floor, if you guys, in your Inventor-- you guys still have that lay out open. The floor, a ground plane-- think about all the tables in this room, all the chairs, the projector screen, all of this stuff has one thing in common. What is it? It sits on the floor.
There's a common ground plane. This is provided in the assembly for you. You can customize this. There are tools. I'm not going to have you go through them for time's sake, but you can stretch it out and resize the floor to any shape you want.
You can lift the floor to any elevation you want. Who's got the highest room here? Who's got a room higher than floor 46? Anybody? Anybody up that high? Man.
Yeah, any height and any elevation you want, you can drag the floor to that elevation. You simply have an assembly per elevation in your design. The first thing you add to the floor usually, in a typical factory layout, is an AutoCAD drawing. Somebody takes the time to model or draw the footprint of the design.
Right up here is a tool called DWG underlay. Select that tool. I believe it should take you to your workspace. You can go into Class Files and Expanded Demo, and you'll find some AutoCAD drawings in there. The AutoCAD drawing I want to use is called supermarket, or supermarket building.
You select that and click Open. What will happen is, it'll take that AutoCAD drawing and it'll put those reference lines on the ground plane. This drawing was done in AutoCAD Architecture. AutoCAD Architecture is part of the product design collection. The reason it's part of the collection is for the Factory Design Utilities. It was a tool that was bundled with the Factory Design Utilities a long time ago.
If you have to do, walls, windows, doors, and you are in Inventor or person like me and you don't know Revit from a hole in the ground, this is a great way to draw walls, windows, and doors. It's old technology. It's an old version of what Revit is now. It's based in AutoCAD.
So the 3D elements you see there were created in Architecture. So I'm going to zoom in. Now I'm going to take a look at my Asset browser. We had your Asset browser open. If you're new to 2018, you know you can undock these things if you want to. I'm going to keep mine docked. But you might have to flip through a couple of these to find it now.
You can go to your user assets. And you should have a nice collection of user assets. One of them is a subfolder called supermarket. I gave you guys my supermarket assets. I'm going to go into my category, there they are.
I don't know how your supermarket is, but I would imagine when you walk in the door, if your supermarket's like mine, there's a coffee bar, like right when you walk in. There's a coffee bar asset up here. I can just simply left click and drag that over, and drop it into the application. Just left click, drag.
It'll find the floor automatically and you can simply drop it off at the front of the store. Your first asset always zooms out. You can zoom back in. Every time you drop an asset, there's this little reposition command that will appear-- the red, green, blue, xyz. You watch up on the screen, if you click the tip of the z-axis, the blue axis, if you click the tip of it you can select it and you can rotate this thing around to any degree you want.
Now I'm just going to leave it at 90 degrees. It'll snap to 90. You could also pick on the shaft of the asset. I'll use the x-axis on the shaft of that. And you can move it on the x-axis alone. Or there's webbing. There's these little work planes in here. It's hard to see, but if I go to the top I can select that plane and move it anywhere I want, free form.
But just right click and select Done, or hit the Enter button to finish the command. You simply drag and drop the asset, drop it off. Usually I place it and I hit Enter, or right click and select Done.
AUDIENCE: How can I revert to [INAUDIBLE]? I convert now, [INAUDIBLE] forget.
RUSTY BELCHER: OK, if you hit Escape, you can move it by itself by simply dragging it around. If you select the asset up here, there is a command called Reposition-- oops, sorry. There's the Reposition command. So if you select the asset and then pick Reposition, the triad will reappear and you can move it some more.
In your Asset browser, there's some checkout counters. And we're not going to go crazy here for time's sake, but I'm going to left click and drag a checkout counter out. I'll drop it onto the floor, use the Reposition command. If you look up on my screen, that's the orientation that I used. I'll right click Done.
And then you can drop a second one right beside it. You can always hit Escape. If you don't want to finish the command, just hit Escape or right-click Done again, or right click OK. You can use the View Cube. Looking down from the top view kind of helps sometimes when you're laying these out. You can drag these around. Want to make sure I avoid the roof supports.
Next time you go to your supermarket, maybe you've never noticed it before. Look at the shelves and see how they avoided the roof supports, the columns in the building. Most of the time the column should land in a shelf, all right? They don't want the column to land right in the middle of the aisle where you have to go around it to get to the products. Somebody had to plan that out. Every building's a little bit different.
AUDIENCE: There is a sort of grid snap?
What's that?
AUDIENCE: Grid, go snap, there is a possibility?
RUSTY BELCHER: There is. You can snap to the grid, absolutely. There's a shopping cart in here somewhere. Where's the shopping cart? Down here, it's the last one. I'll left click and drag this out.
I want to make sure I can get my shopping cart through the gaps. I'm going to drop in a shopping cart, move it in there and just make sure I've got plenty of room. Right click Done. Remember that right clicking Done or hit Escape. Now I'm going to drop in a few shelves. There is a shelf, two sided-- shelf, two sides.
I'm going to drag in and drop one of these behind the counter here. So I'm going to drop one of these in. And notice the little green dots that appear. When you place one of them right click and select Done. And then notice the green dots. They're called connectors. This allows the assets to snap together like little building bricks.
So you can do a strand of double sided shelves really easily. Just right click and select Done after you place three or four of them together. These shelves have parameters. These were done inside of Inventor. So when I built these shelves, I had a length parameter that I included in the design.
If you want to modify the parameter, you need another palette. Instead of the Asset browser palette, if you go back up to the palettes command, you'll find one called Factory Properties. Now my Factory Properties palette, I am going to float over here. I'm going to leave the Asset browser on the ribbon. And I'm going to drag the Factory Properties palette off to the side.
If you select an asset, one of the shelves-- pick one of the shelves. If you pick an asset, you'll see the available parameters in the property window. So right here is length. I have a dropdown list for 72 or 96. I'll pick 96, and then click the little lightning bolt-- in the Properties dialog there's an Update button. If you click that, that asset will stretch out to the standard value.
You can drag this chain of assets around now. So this is where we could, you know, as supermarket designers, we could come in and say, you know what? I think, well, that doesn't fit exactly right. But the modification to those two end shelves is not bad. I'll do that. Go back to my isometric view.
I'm not going to show you this, but you can use old Copy Paste. If I select those four shelves, I can right click Copy, right click Paste, Control C, Control V, and do the next row of shelves over. They'll come in attached to each other.
When you look at this, I hope some of you see, hey, this is like working in blocks in AutoCAD! You've been doing that forever if you're an AutoCAD user. But if you're an Inventor user, we haven't had anything like that. This is like a block palette that you see inside of AutoCAD, but now we have asset-based workflows inside of Inventor.
So the floor, a huge advantage. Many people their designs, just like the supermarket, tend to land on a common ground plane. The integration of AutoCAD data-- I want to use my AutoCAD data to build my Inventor models. Man, have I heard that one before! I want to build my Inventor stuff directly on top of my old AutoCAD file. That's available here with the DWG Underlay.
Asset based design-- I always call this Lego CAD. The way those parts were snapping together like little building bricks. I haven't been on the exhibit floor yet. I've been extremely busy this AU. But I hear LEGOs have taken over the exhibit floor. Maybe you saw some of those while you were down there.
Having assets snap together, it's just an in-- you know how long it would take me to constrain all this stuff together with conventional Inventor workflows? It'd take forever. Being able to customize and create your own user assets, you're not you're not limited to the default category or the default catalog that comes with the tool. If we have time I'll show you the conveyors and the robots and all of the stuff that people in automotive industries and people in plant design-- I'll show you all that stuff. It's all available.
But the real amazing feature here is that you can create your own assets. These assets, the ones I just showed you, they're just regular Inventor files. If you can get it into Inventor, you can make it an asset. If you model it in Inventor with parameters, you can make it a dynamic asset. I mentioned the asset parameters.
Asset propagation-- so I'm going to kind of curve, or kind of change my plan here just a little bit. In the supermarket, I want to go to the loading area in the back. I've got a model that came from another CAD supplier, another CAD operator. And I need to use his model in my design.
On your Factory ribbon, I want you to find the Layout tab. I love this command. I just don't like where they placed it in the ribbon. I really don't modify my ribbons too much. But this is what I would modify if I had a chance. On the Layout tab, the very first command is called Insert Model.
Now before I have you insert the model, take a look at all of the supported file types that are in the list. All the Inventor stuff is here, AutoCAD, Alias, Catia, both v4, v5, Siemen's NX, JT files, IGES, Fusion-- woo hoo! I have the new release, the 2018.2 release, that just came out a couple weeks ago-- or about a week ago. So I can now import Fusion models as assets, pretty sweet.
OBJ files for meshes. I mentioned meshes earlier. They wouldn't give me the class this year so I'll just tell you how to do it. Go to SketchUp. Take a SketchUp model, open it in 3D Studio-- of all things, 3D Studio. Then you can export it to OBJ. Export it to OBJ, you can bring it into Inventor as an OBJ file. So now all of Google SketchUp's library, you can use it if you need to with the Factory Design Utilities.
Parasolids, ProE, STEP, IGES, ACIS, STL, Solidworks-- all of those. They're all in here. I don't care where the stuff came from, you can use it. How many of you guys belong to GrabCAD? Help me out. How many of you should belong to GrabCAD? Should raise your hand. GrabCAD is Facebook for us, Facebook for modelers.
Homework, go home and join GrabCAD. Give them your email address. Give them a password. It's just like joining Facebook. Upload some models, download some models, they're all free. They don't care what software you use. It's 3D, share it with the world.
All right, I'm going to go into class files and into expanded demo. And there is a part file here, 78230-3D. This was originally an AutoCAD file. I've already converted it to Inventor, but initially it came from AutoCAD. Go ahead and select Open. This is not an asset.
But I want you to see what happens. Even though it's not an asset, it puts a bounding box around it and it lands on the floor. So I'm just going to stick it in the back corner over here. If it came in on its side, you have the XYZ options to determine which way is up. So if the originator was using y as up-- who would ever use y as the up direction? Can you imagine what kind of crazy people decide y is up? Autodesk.
I mean, sorry-- click the little check mark, though, and it'll come in. It'll land on the floor. You can reposition it, just like your other tools, if you need to. But it's not a published asset. So I'm just going to right click and select Done.
You can use models from anywhere with the Factory Design Utilities. You know how many of my customers need to do that, need to collaborate efficiently with people outside your organization using a different kind of software in a situation like this? All right, so over in the Asset browser, this guy, the catalog if you want to call it that, the Asset browser, I'm going to click upwards. This is just, it's a directory. It's a catalog of directories.
I'm going to click up. This takes me to my next level up from where I'm at. This is basically all the assets that you copied earlier. I want you to find Ship Design. So I'm kind of crossing disciplines here, for times sake.
But when you go into ship design, you're going to see sub-catalogs, or subcategories. Shipbuilders are a crazy bunch of people. I ain't never seen these-- oh, my gosh. You guys know how much the last aircraft carrier cost? Somebody want to guess?
How many billion did it cost? 14-- one boat, $14 billion. Built right around my neighborhood. I can drive down, look at it. It's a pretty boat. It's amazing.
The shipbuilding industry, they use every kind of software imaginable. They do. The HVAC guys using one piece of software, the piping guys are using another piece of software, structural steel and electrical are using another piece of software. They need to collaborate together. So I have the different categories here. I'm going to go into piping.
I'm a ship fitter-- not a pipefitter. I heard somebody yesterday said, none of y'all here are pipefitters, and I kind of cringed. I'm a fitter fitter, that's what I trained as. There is an asset up here called pipe. I'm going to left click and drag this down and I'm just going to place it vertically right here on the ground, right beside the pump, and click the check mark.
Just place it right there. You can hit Escape. And I'll give you one of my favorite, favorite Inventor tips. If you zoom in, you hold-- listen, this is, don't tell anybody I told you this, OK? If anybody asks you where you learned, this don't point me out. I want to constrain the pipe to the top of the pump here, It's on of these vertical cylinders.
I'm going to hold the Alt button down on my keyboard. I'm going to left click and drag the bottom of the pipe up to the top pipe up here, let go. And you can let go of the Alt button. That's a drag and drop constraint. It's been in Inventor since almost the beginning of time. No one ever uses it.
So I don't want you guys to be nearly as productive as I am, because I need to stay up here teaching you guys. So when you get back, there's all kinds of ways you can use that drag and drop constraint. It's a really cool little tip, but I need to move on. So this piece of pipe has parametric properties.
Why don't you select it? And in your property panel, set the diameter to four inches. Click Update. I know it's too big but I want you to be able to see what goes on with these connectors.
Listen, you do not have to run your pipe like I run mine, OK? If yours pops up and it goes in a different direction, for the sake of this example you can run pipe anywhere you want to. In the dialogue-- I'm sorry, in the Asset browser though, I'm going to find, it's called pipe elbow A. I'm going to use A. Drag it out and notice that you can snap it to the top of the pipe.
One connector will go one direction, the other connector will go the opposite direction. That's just how I created them. And when you drop it off, I hope, if we got our connector classes right, the elbow should automatically assume it's a four inch diameter. The parameters should propagate from the original asset to the new one. That way I don't have to type in "four" every single time I drop this off.
Those are those connector classes. I wanted you to see that. I don't have time to sit here and type, over and over again, every time I drop in an asset. I need the assets to talk to one another. So I'll drag in another piece of pipe. I'll hook it up to the elbow. It automatically resizes.
I'll drag in a valve. I'm just going to drag in one of the green valve-- I used A. The valve will automatically resize. And I'll just throw another piece of pipe on the other side here.
Most of the pipefitters I grew up with, this is how they work on a daily basis. They go up on the ship, and they put up pipe one piece at a time. If you call this stick building, I'm right there with you. But I'll be honest, I could put this in front of a guy who's pipefitter on a ship right now and he could do this. He could show me how to run pipe, how they've done it for years.
It's meant to be easy. It's meant to be easy to pick up and use these utilities. Let's say that the diameter of the pipe changes. Select one of the-- it doesn't matter, an elbow or a length of pipe. Select it, change the diameter back down to two inches, and click Update.
AUDIENCE: Where is the Properties panel [INAUDIBLE]?
RUSTY BELCHER: That's OK. The Properties panel, if you go to pallets, bring up your factory properties. If it's docked up here, you'll have to tab back and forth or toggle back and forth between them. But change one diameter, and all the assets in the string should propagate to the correct value. It is meant to be simple. All right, yeah?
AUDIENCE: I know you mentioned Reposition, but what-- my place is going 90 or 180 in the other direction. How do get it to around and still be connected, using your--
RUSTY BELCHER: OK. I'm going to hit F7. I'm holding F7 and I can drop this off to the side. There's a second elbow that goes the opposite direction. Or, the original elbow, there's a parameter with what direction it goes to. That's the way-- I have three of them that I've created over time. The first elbow has a parameter for what direction you want, 0, 90, 45, 180, 360, or 270. It just happens to be the one that you want to use.
AUDIENCE: It's also good for [INAUDIBLE].
RUSTY BELCHER: You could. Could also use constraints. If all else fails, where you have Inventor as our supporting piece of software, I can just drop in a constraint and do it that way. Constraints don't propagate the parameters, only the connectors do. OK?
Ease of use-- again in PowerPoint, why are other industries looking at the Factory Design Utilities? Ease of use. Collaborative efforts with other people using different CAD software. The connector points, or the LEGO CAD idea. Having your assets snap together. Workflows for extremely large data sets.
All right, the product design collection, product design manufacturing collection. It has Navisworks built into it. Navisworks honors the Factory Utilities. All of this stuff ports over in the Navisworks easily. So I can do one layout, I can do the next layout, I can do the next lay out, and throw all of it into Navisworks at the same time and show you the entire facility all at once.
A long time ago, when Factory first came out, the only way to get Navisworks was with the Factory Utilities. Once everybody saw what you could do with Navisworks, now Navisworks is everywhere. All right, section three, identify designs that could be created with the Factory Design Utilities. Well, I've already mentioned shipbuilding. I've got 30 minutes left, so I'm not going to dwell too much on this. But the HVAC, the ductwork, the electrical wire ways, all the machinery, all the structural steel-- If you can design it, like that keynote address, to be based on standard parameters we can incorporate that design technique with the Factory Design Suite.
The bulkheads in this design, that the HVAC, the duct work, the electrical wire ways, all of these things are standard assets. A compartment that would take a couple of people months to finish, you could do in a day if you have the proper assets to support the overall project. Supermarket retail spaces-- I've been in tons of supermarkets. They're all basically built from the same stuff. They're just laid out differently.
So the idea of asset-based design, parameter propagation, what if scenarios. A lot of times, if you're sitting there trying to find the most logical place to put this stuff, it's like playing chess. You're trying to find a strategic location that gives the best flow and gives the best aesthetic effect.
And it's so easy to move the stuff around. If somebody wants to try a different scenario, hey, five or 10 minutes of moving stuff around. I'll let the customer see if they like that better. I don't have to stopping completely redo the project just because the customer wants to see a couple of different alternatives.
So I will let you guys do some ship stuff. I talk about this every year, and every year I always make it more expensive. Onboard an aircraft carrier, there is a guy called the Airboss. Actually there's an Airboss, they're up in the pri-fly. They're up in the island house and they look down on the flight deck.
And they need to keep track of all of their flight assets-- all of the people, all of this support staff, all of the fuel lines, all of the million, billion dollar aircraft that are up there on the flight deck. And they need to look down and see the status of those assets at a moment's notice. And guess what they use? Anybody know? Anybody seen one of these things before?
They use something called a Ouija board. It is a piece of plywood shaped like the deck of the aircraft carrier. And on that piece of plywood is a bunch of little airplanes, little cardboard cut outs of an airplane. And somebody is responsible that as the airplane is moving, they keep the Ouija board up to date. If it's under repair, they flip it upside down. It has a different color on the other side.
They'll put a nut on it, a little fastener nut, to does say, hey, it's under repair. It's under maintenance. A green thumbtack or a red thumbtack would mean something else. Weapons might be on the way up and fueling might be in process. They use this for a lot of reasons. This is how they've done it forever.
But a couple of years ago, somebody decided in the government that they needed to automate this. They needed to get rid of the Ouija board and they wanted to spend-- they spent a ton of money coming up with an application that runs on a computer that manages and tracks all the assets on the flight deck. They did not ask me because I'd have told them, this is what Factory Design suite does. I can look at my entire floor, hover over one asset and tell you the state of that asset if I've built in the proper parameters for it.
So I want you guys to see this, too. So let's close-- I'm going to close the little supermarket. We're not going to save it. I've got backup copies if we need to discuss it later. And I'm going to do a new layout.
Usually, you use the DWG underlay. That's usually what you do. Usually you drop in an AutoCAD footprint of the flight deck, or whatever you want to work on. But I'm going to go to layout for this one, and I'm going to select Insert Model. On Insert Model, I want you to find, in your expanded demo folder, CBN78 Top View.
Click Open. You'll zoom out a little bit. This is a full scale carrier flight deck. Just kind of position it. There is no real 00 here, just position it where you think it looks good, and click the little check mark.
You're not looking at sensitive information. I got that from Google SketchUp. You can go download the entire aircraft carrier there if you want to. It's not real, but it's pretty close.
The grid becomes so small at this point. So just, here's a tip, over here see the little upside down magnet? They're called snap pipes. Underneath of that you'll find Options, and you'll find Floor and Grid Settings. In the Floor and Grid Settings, you'll come down and see right now the grid is at 36 inches. Well, listen I'm going to highlight 36 inches and I'm going to type in 100 foot and then Enter.
Don't worry about having massive floor space to cover, OK? That's absolutely supported with the tool. Millions of square feet, not a problem with the Factory Design Utilities. In my Asset browser, I'm going to go back up to my user assets, to the little upper level here. Hit it a couple of times, and you'll find my flight deck assets. I shared those with you guys.
I got an F-18. Stay away from the Osprey, please. Don't add the Osprey. It's kind of a big file. F-14, I have a COD, a Cod. One of the highlights of my life was riding that. I got to ride that onto the carrier when they were doing the support for Desert storm. They were enforcing the no fly zone. I flew out to the Nimitz and landed on the carrier.
So I did catch the wire. I wanted to get a shot off but they took me off on a helicopter. I think it was a weight issue, they didn't want to try it. But I have a few airplanes here. So I'm going to drag the F-18. I'm going to drag this one out. And there's one over here, parked on the elevator of the image. I'm just going to drop it off and kind of put it right on top of it.
There's one. The next one here, these multimillion dollar aircraft-- the flight deck is huge, right? But there's no space on it. Space is a premium when you're out in the ocean. So when they park these aircraft, when they're deployed, they park them with the tail hanging off the side of the ship. That's how limited the space is on an aircraft carrier flight deck.
It is a crazy place. The week I was on board the aircraft carrier, I saw some of the most amazing things. And what they were doing on the flight deck was incredible. Over here, these little double lines, the double white lines, that's the catapult. So let's put one of the planes here on the catapult.
And we'll go old school here, we'll grab a F-14 Tomcat, do a little Top Gun action here. We'll put him on the catapult right next to that. So on the F-18 that's on the catapult, this is an asset. I can select it and then the properties for that will appear and I can do a couple of things.
I just simulated this, so the flight number. I'm going to go with 222 for the flight number. The fuel status is fueled. Jet color is green-- green in my case means go. We're all good. Green is good.
It's go for flight, for the maintenance. And then the wings, instead of in the up position, I'm going to select down and I'll click the Update button. And it might take a second on yours to update but the asset will update to that configuration. Man, did I say configuration? I did.
This is very much like a configurator. If you zoom in to the asset, you'll see the flight number displayed on the plane. If I hover over it, just touch it for a second, you'll see a Tooltip appears and it has the status of the asset. So at a moment's notice, somebody could touch the asset, read the descriptor, and see what the status is of that particular asset.
You want to mess with the Tomcat? That's fine. I'll just go with, one, two, four, any number you want-- fueled, green, wings are out in this case. Click the Update button. I love shipbuilders, innovators, they've done some crazy things in the past. Love our military, but man I wish they'd asked me before they spent those billions of dollars coming up with that asset monitoring tool.
Guess what they're still using on aircraft carriers now? No lie, they're still using the Ouija board.
AUDIENCE: Because that don't crash.
RUSTY BELCHER: It doesn't. That's one of the big benefits of the Ouija board is, if the power goes out you can still use it. Not going to do it but it could drop drawings of this.
So the here's a drawing I created of the asset. Your leaders can declare all the properties of the selected asset. We could have an updated drawing going on in the background. We can have an automatic update on the drawings going on so that the drawing up on flight deck is always showing me the active data at any given time, the active asset configuration.
Sometimes people are not laying out their facilities. Sometimes people need to model their facility to keep up with it. I'm not going to do circuit boards for time's sake but I want you to understand, big or small, it doesn't matter. You could lay out circuit boards with the Factory Design Utilities. Put the proper chips and LEDs, in place put the Arduinos or the raspberry pis in place, snap fit them together and move on.
In the same situation, one of the new things with Factory is that your DWG underlay now becomes part of the drawing. So when you go to a document inside of Inventor, you can show the DWG underlay and the assets on top of it now. That is not a big feature that's been promoted but in the past few releases, the DWG underlay has done some really cool things so that you can do almost all your documentation in Inventor if you want to.
All right, I got 15 minutes to talk about asset publishing. Asset publishing, where do these assets come from? All right, there are two kinds of assets.
Static assets, things that don't move, things that are just as, copiers. That shopping cart, all right? Tons of things-- we're going to use a basketball hoop in a minute. But things that don't change-- you can download those things from anywhere. Go to GrabCAD, find a basketball hoop, bring it in, you're good. Turn it into an asset if you want to.
Dynamic assets-- things that utilize parameters. Those things have to be modeled in Inventor. Use typical Inventor modeling processes to create those parametric assets. So the shelving system that you saw, the airplanes with the folded wings, those were all done in Inventor. So let's do an asset. Leave the aircraft carrier up for a minute.
Let's go to File, Open. Go into your class files, expanded demo, and find the basketball hoop. A few years ago-- actually, more than a few years ago, like a decade ago-- they played the first college basketball game on board a Naval vessel. They did it on on an aircraft carrier. And I modeled that project. Not for anyone, I just did it because it was cool. And I needed a basketball hoop and I downloaded this from GrabCAD.
Just comes right in from GrabCAD. I want to turn this into an asset. With the Factory Design Utilities up here, do you guys see a tab here that says Create Asset? You can also see it on Factory, you can go into the Asset Builder. But on Create Asset, you can select the Asset Builder. It's the very first button on the Create Asset tab.
A very brief rundown of this, basically you work from the left to the right. The very first button is your landing surface. I select my landing surface. I'm going to pick the bottom face of the basketball hoop and it will orient itself correctly. That's how it knows to land on the ground. Pick the face that's going to land on the ground.
There is an insertion point here. If you go over to the browser, you don't have to do this, but I could go on and turn on a work point. Or I think I could come over and select a work point-- work point number two. So with insertion point, you could come over in the browser and select work point number two. It's all the way at the bottom of the tree.
If you've ever created a block, you select the data, in AutoCAD you select it and then you give it an insertion point. That's exactly what we're doing inside of Inventor. Once you have those two things, you can click OK. You now have your landing surface and insertion point.
You should fill out your asset properties, your file properties. This is critical for downstream use. What kind of basketball hoop? What's the make, model, VIN number, anything like that? I'm going to skip that right now, but this is a huge step. Fill up the data that you need. This is really ready to go. All I'd have to do is reach over and click Publish Asset.
Once you guys click Publish Asset, it tells you you have to save your file. You guys, I don't want to ruin this one so you guys go ahead and click Yes to save. And I'll tell you what, I'll do mine too. In the Published Asset area, you can see your user asset. Where do you want to publish it to? I can go to User Assets, and I can just save it right there.
Reach down and click OK. When you click OK, it's going to create the asset for you. It does a 2D top down view that you use in AutoCAD. So it creates a 2D asset for AutoCAD of the same thing. It creates a Navisworks file. If you ever want to use this in Navisworks, it already publishes the Navisworks data. Does all of that automatically.
You can create subcategories and subfolders to your heart's content to organize your assets. All right, I'm going to close my basketball hoop. Now I want to do a dynamic asset. And I've only got 10 minutes, so you guys, I apologize if this is a bit brief. But let's go to File, New. In Inventor, we'll go up to File, New and select a standard IPT file.
Dynamic assets are simply Inventor Part Files. That is all they are. There is no special code, no independent thing that's going to be ruined if I remove the factory utilities, or if I send this data to somebody who doesn't have the Factory Design Suite. It's just a regular Inventor file.
I'm going to sketch-- the very first button is Sketch-- and I'm going to select the xy plane. I call it the front plane because it lines up with the front of the cube. Going to sketch on the xy plane.
If you've never modeled in Inventor before, I hope you're in for a treat once you learn how to do it. I know I ever want to go back to modeling in AutoCAD. I love AutoCAD, but I don't never want to have to go back and work in AutoCAD and model there. I'm going to draw a rectangle. Line, circle, arc, rectangle-- I'm just going to draw a rectangle right up here. The little yellow dot is zero-- that's 0,0. Just draw that rectangle for me.
Even though I'm crunched for time here, I'm not going to model this incorrectly. I'm going to abide by my standards. There is a constraint up here called co-incident. Co-incident means, point online or point on point. It's a geometric constraint. So if you click Co-incident, you can pick the midpoint on this bottom edge of the rectangle, and pick 0,0.
So now the rectangle lies on top of 0,0. Just hit Escape after that. How many of you have done parametric modeling in Inventor before? How many of you have messed with parameters? About half the class-- that's good. I hope you know this next step.
But if not, this is how I model parametrically. I want to do the height of the-- this is a tent, by the way. I want to use the dimension command, and I'm going to select the vertical line here. And I'm going to click to drop off the dimension. You click to place it. In the dialogue that appears, you'll notice it's ready for you to type. I want you to type in the word, Length-- Capital L-e-n-g-t-h, Length.
What color is that text? Nobody got it? Is it red, did I hear that? Red means Inventor is saying, Rusty, I have no idea what you're talking about, all right? What is length? I have no idea. After length, click equals and then 120. Notice it turns black after that. Oh, length equals 120, got it.
Have to zoom out. Your first dimension scales your sketch. The next dimension will be the width of the tent. I'll click the line, drop off the dimension, and the same thing. I use a capital for the first letter. I always do that. That's what Autodesk does when they create their assets. They capitalize the first letter in the parameter name.
So W-i-d-t-h, equals 360. Folks, if I had time I'd put a nice little peak on the top of that tent but we're going to bypass that for time, all right? I'm going to finish my sketch. And I want to extrude.
When you finished the sketch it puts you automatically in the 3D modeling tab. If you click Extrude, it's almost the first button, it's the second button in line, it'll pick your profile. In the dialog box, find Symmetric. I want to go both directions. And for the value, I'm going to type in Length-- capital L-e-n-g-t-h.
I don't know why that's black but it shouldn't be.
AUDIENCE: You did the other one as length, Rusty.
RUSTY BELCHER: What's that?
AUDIENCE: You did first one as length.
RUSTY BELCHER: Oh, I did?
AUDIENCE: Should have called it height, so make this height.
RUSTY BELCHER: All right, make it height. Sorry about that-- H-e-i-g-h-t. thank you, Pete. Height equals, oh my gosh, let's go with 600. If you guys can imagine that tent has a peak roof on it, we just didn't have time to model that feature.
That is basic Inventor modeling. It's parametric modeling. Normally you don't always name the dimension but when I'm modeling assets, I do. You can incorporate parameter modeling into your current processes no problem. Now I'm going to go to the Factory tab and I'm going to go to the Asset Builder. On the Asset Builder, you'll see the key parameters panel. If you've renamed the assets they automatically appear.
So all you have to do is check them. By checking them, what you're saying is I want these to be parameters in the final asset. This is how you build that property dialog box. Man, I wish I had time. This is some new stuff in 2018. I can give these factory names, so I can have the parameter dialog box appear in a particular order now.
So length, width, and height, I can actually have it set up that way. But for time's sake I'm going to move on. I simply mark these as key parameters. And it's basically the same thing we did earlier. I click the landing surface, like when I selected the bottom of the tent. The insertion point, I'm going to pick each corner.
You can have multiple insertion points. You can tab between insertion points when you're dropping the asset. I'll click OK. We should absolutely fill out our properties but I want to show you the connectors. I want to show you how difficult it is to code that little green dot. See the little puzzle pieces? The second button in line, that's Define Connector.
I'm going to put the connector right here on the back end of the tent, right on the midpoint at the ground. I'm going to select, that's where the connector's going to go. You're going to click the red arrow. The red arrow should point towards the next asset that it's going to connect to. I always say red, out. So select the red axis, pick this face, red points outwards. The blue axis typically points upward. So I click the blue axis, I'll pick the top of our tent.
I always say red out, blue up. That's how I remember it. And right click and select OK. That's all that connector is. If you'd like to try it again, you can go to the other side. You have to start the command again. You pick your point-- you can pick a point in the middle of the face, at any corner, or any midpoint.
Red axis goes outwards, the blue axis goes upwards. Right click and select OK. We should publish our assets. If I click Publish Asset it tells me I have to save. I can give it a name.
I'm not going to save this one for time's sake, because we're right at the end of the class. But that's how, you're right there. You just publish it and now you have a dynamic asset. They are not difficult to create.
I do have a class I taught the past couple of years. It's on AU Online. If you're interested, it's called the Factory Asset Checklist. It's up there twice. So if you want to learn about all the things you need to know about publishing assets, AU Online is a great resource for that.
Just a class that I've done in the past. You can download a checklist of all the things you need to think about when you publish your assets. If we had time, we'd go out and put the tent and the basketball court up on the aircraft carrier, but for time's sake we couldn't get that far. But large scale visualization for event planning is something that people have done for quite a long time. That process, that project actually happened. They actually had the basketball game on the aircraft carrier.
I'm going to open up Navisworks real quick, just to finish up. I wanted you to see, this is a really pivotal member of the Factory Design-- I hate to say suite, but it's a member of the group. So real quickly, I can show you there's the carrier I got from GrabCAD. You guys were just using a picture here. When you used the flight deck inside of the Factory Design Suite it was just a picture of the top deck, scaled full scale.
But I placed the basketball court, I modeled the bleachers, I got the TV trucks, port-a-potties, souvenir tents, everything. About five hours worth of work to put that together, to mimic what I saw in USA Today when the project came out. Real quick, you can use point clouds. You can use meshes. You can use anything as an asset, all right?
If you have laser scanning, are you're incorporating point clouds in your current process, all of that information can be utilized as an asset. If you want to. So in all respect in the end of this, went a little bit short on time. But I hope you understand Factory Design Suite's not just for factories. Anyone using Inventor has an opportunity to utilize this functionality. When you get back to the office, if you don't have it installed, get with your group, your IT guys, tell them to put the utilities on.
You guys are paying for them. If you have the collection, if you have-- at least if you're on the product design collection, they're part of the collection. You have them already. Just get IT to install them and you're ready to go, all right?
So I appreciate everybody's time and attention. I really do thank you for the chance to come in to speak with you. Take the time. Please look at the survey if you can. Just let us know how we did, let us know what you need next year in case we can make the class any better for you.
All right, so that's it as far-- I don't see anybody coming in just yet. But if there's any questions, we can go and handle those. But as far as the class goes, you guys are free to head out, all right? You guys enjoy AU. And if there's any questions, just let me know. What do you got?
AUDIENCE: Are there any training materials out there for this?
RUSTY BELCHER: There are. The Factory Design Utility courseware, I wrote it in 2012. I think I updated it in 2013. And to me right now, that's the only one that's out there.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
RUSTY BELCHER: I believe Ascent has it. Autodesk owns it, but I believe Ascent can get you a copy of that if you need it. Ascented.com is where you can go to look for that. All right? Any other questions?
AUDIENCE: So a guy-- I think he's from [INAUDIBLE] Engineering, did a-- some [INAUDIBLE] guy, who used AutoCAD or something like that. Or he created a [INAUDIBLE]
RUSTY BELCHER: Yep.
AUDIENCE: And then it [INAUDIBLE] while they deleted the models.
RUSTY BELCHER: Yep.
AUDIENCE: All of that [INAUDIBLE].
RUSTY BELCHER: There is a workflow where you can start this whole process in AutoCAD and just use 2D-- every time you publish an asset, you get a 2D and 3D version. So in AutoCAD you do the 2D layout with the symbols, little blocks, that's all they are. And there is a button called Sync to Inventor. If you click that, if you click Sync to Inventor it opens Inventor and it puts the 3D model on top of the 2D footprint automatically.
AUDIENCE: So there's a workbook for that?
RUSTY BELCHER: Sure, yep.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
RUSTY BELCHER: It's part of the Factory Utilities. The AutoCAD version of the Factory Utilities. So it does work. The substation design is, honestly, it's Factory design. They just have loaded their own models into it.
AUDIENCE: So [INAUDIBLE]?
AUDIENCE: Or is it something that you would learn and use?
RUSTY BELCHER: If you come to the training class it's something we cover in training.
AUDIENCE: Training for factory?
RUSTY BELCHER: For factory, yep. Called Sync to Inventor. You can also, in Inventor, I can sync to AutoCAD. I can go the opposite way. I can create a 2D layout in AutoCAD of my Inventor file.
AUDIENCE: Do you know Jason Bandish?
RUSTY BELCHER: Jason Bandish, I know the name.
AUDIENCE: He's coded for you guys.
RUSTY BELCHER: Yep, Duke--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
RUSTY BELCHER: Jason Bandish, I believe he's one of the authors of the thing.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
RUSTY BELCHER: Yep, that's right. Duke Energy in Carolina, Huge, that's their bread and butter, yep.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
RUSTY BELCHER: When I taught at Duke for Duke Energy, I was using the Factory and they had a substation add on. And then that kind of grew into--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
RUSTY BELCHER: Yep, that's right, it's Substation Design Suite. Yep. Yes?
AUDIENCE: I'm curious [INAUDIBLE]. Can we take or transfer those assets to a--
RUSTY BELCHER: I do not mind at all if you go to stick-- I haven't seen anyone do that yet but, yeah. There's no proprietary stuff in there. You're more than welcome to it.
AUDIENCE: Aren't you going to download the files from the AU [INAUDIBLE]?
RUSTY BELCHER: Eventually I'll post the files to the AU Online site so you can download them up there as well, all right? All right, you guys enjoy AU any other questions, you guys let me know.