The Interoperable Inventor

MIKE THOMAS: All, right well I guess we'll get going. Thank you for everybody who's showed up here on Thursday afternoon on the end of AU. My name is Mike Thomas, I'm a Technical Services Manager with a large mining equipment manufacturer. With me, we've got Kevin.

KEVIN ELLINGSON: Hi, I'm Kevin Ellingson. Worked with Autodesk projects, a lot of years in the industry, worked for Autodesk reseller, now I'm kind of an independent consultant on CAD/CAM products. Okay, want to go to the next slide?

MIKE THOMAS: Okay, so, what our goal is today is we want to show you kind of the ins and outs of what data can go into and out of Inventor. So, we will maybe show you some different areas never maybe considered, some different avenues, also take a look at some of the new features, like kind of come into Inventor with 2016 and 2017. Next slide.

So, I guess maybe just a quick poll, is anybody not using Inventor? Everybody's using Inventor? Great. Anybody-- who's on 2017? Who's on 2016? Who's on 2015? Who's on 2014? And the people who didn't put up their hand, what version are you on? What version are you on? I didn't see your hand go up.

AUDIENCE: Oh, it's 2017, I'm just a little slow today.

MIKE THOMAS: You want to go to the next slide? All right, so, you're probably tired of seeing this all week long, so, instead of looking at the future of making things, let's look at the reality of making things. So like, what can we do today, not waiting for the future?

So, obviously technology is disruptive. I mean, you look at the two slides here and you can see how things have changed, maybe in the past 100 years. And obviously, everything is accelerating quicker and quicker and quicker. I was listening to a podcast on the way down and they were talking about the history of war, and how you could have taken Alexander the Great's army versus an army from the 1700s, and they would have been equal, but if you would have taken like France's army from World War I they would have completely destroyed Alexander the Great's, and how we hit the Industrial Revolution, and then even in the military it just completely spiked. So, things are going faster and faster and faster. Want to go to the next?

So, in the grand schemes of things, we've kind of gone through three eras. So obviously, we started with computers, and we started documenting everything. So, we started dimensioning and annotating and capturing all this information we were able to store electronically, and then we moved into optimization where we got into to 3D modeling, and we started doing stress analysis, and we started doing all these type of things where we could optimize the models. So, not that we're out of the optimization, but now we're moving into the connection realm, where we want to grow past just the 3D model.

So trends, obviously, is people want it in shorter time, which means we have less time. We don't know when they're going to want it, so it's going to go up and down. And they're going to want it the way they want it, so they're going to want it customized, and we don't know where that demand is going to come from. So, instead of worrying about selling into your neighborhood, now you're worried about selling worldwide, the demand coming from worldwide.

This happened to us, probably the past two, three years, because I'm from Canada, and for the longest time we focused on our province. We were selling into the mines, into our province, and it was good, but then all of a sudden, Potash took a dive, and all of a sudden, now what? We started looking around, and also we started getting demand from Russia, and Brazil, and markets where you know the Potash, or other products, wasn't as impactful as what it was in North America.

So, the transit production, obviously, the focus we are, is Collaborative Distributed Design and Production. That's kind of what we're going to focus in on this class. But also, what can Inventor do with manufacturing? Obviously there's lots of Advanced Materials and Fabrication, we're not going to look at Generative Design. I mean that's going to be coming, but really look at the Collaborative and Distributed Design and Production, and what we can do within manufacturing.

So, what we're going to look at is, we're going to look at the technology. So, what technology within Inventor and Design Suite, or the collection, that can enable us to do that. You want to go two slides? Right, so we're to look at the Inventor. Next slide. So Interoperability, I thought this was perfect. Googled it, and this is the very first definition that came up. As you can see, it's the ability for different information into different systems. And everybody's got that problem, right? We've got to go from CAD into manufacturing, we got to go from CAD into data management. We've got to go from CAD into our URP or MRP or whatever systems. So data's got to move around quite a bit.

So, when I started in the industry 20-odd years ago, we all worked in a silo. We had our team, our company, and maybe you'd send out a DXF, or maybe you'd send out a drawing. Can you imagine 20 years ago saying, here is my entire model? Just go with it? It wouldn't have happened, for lots of reasons. I mean, internet, and there was no real email, but it just was a foreign concept. We didn't exchange data. It was like, we were within our silo, and that's where we stayed. So, Inventor has changed quite a bit from the very first version of it, which could open the data.bg file, but it couldn't actually generate a data.bg. File it could create a DXF and maybe a STEP file, that was about it. So, even Inventor's lifetime has changed quite a bit.

So, we look at the couch collaboration tools one of our next slide Inventor can work with all these formats that you see up here. So Inventor has the ability to read and write the majority of the formats up here. So, it can work with SolidWorks and Siemens, and as you can see Artist products like Alias, it can work with neutral file formats.

So, has anybody heard of the AnyCAD functionality? AnyCAD? It's one of the greatest enhancements, best enhancements that's come in Inventor easily in the past five years. If you haven't heard of AnyCAD, what AnyCAD allows you to do is it allows you to take one of these formats, and you don't have to translate it. You basically just attach it into your model as a reference. You can constrain to it. You can actually kind of in a roundabout way, but you can add features to it. And if that original format changes, guess what? It updates in Inventor.

So, that means that somebody could be using SolidWorks, maybe it's one of your vendors, or your customer, and they send you the SolidWorks file, but you don't have to worry about translating it, and converting it, and missing faces, and reverse faces, and holes, and gaps, and all the stuff that you've got to worry about translating and fixing, whereas you just simply attach the model, and the model stays associative to that file. So, they send you an updated SolidWorks file, it updates within Inventor. And that works for anything that you see up there.

Inventor also has support to bring in point cloud data. May not have thought that Inventor as this ability, but just like AutoCAD, you push it through ReCap-- ReCap's Autodesk's program to deal with point clouds-- and basically it's just got to kind of scan that file, itemize the points in there, and then you can attach it with in Inventor. You can bring in PCB boards. It will work with AutoCAD electrical data.

So in electrical, mechanical realm, you can take an AutoCAD electrical project, which has components in it, basically link that project with Inventor, and say, okay, I want to insert these components, and you're actually inserting the same component that's in the AutoCAD electrical schematic. So you have basically one item that it's pulling data from, and if you remove one from one side, then there's a little flag that says, oh, we removed this, you need to remove it on this side as well.

Okay, well, on the communications side of things, what we have is we have things like DWG And DXF. You can go to the next slide. So, good old traditional DWG, DXF. I mean if you want to get something laser cut or plasma cut, that person is going to want a DWG or DXF. We can do PDF, and as of Inventor 2016, 2017? 2016. We do 3D PDF, so you can take your 3D models and you can publish them to PDF.

There's also this new option called Connected Design? Paul, what's it called? Design Connect? Anybody? Connected Design. I'm assuming, by the looks, nobody's tried it? Nobody's tried it? How come? Why hasn't anybody tried it? Yeah, a little blue button in the bottom right corner by default. No one's seen the blue button either? Okay, we'll show you what it does. So, we also have the Design Suite, the different flavors. It's also the new product collection of manufacturing software, assuming everybody is on Ultimate or Standard, or some form.

So, you get as part or you download, you get this install window that's about this long that you need to scroll up and down to find all the software. But you got of all these different components within it. So, within this collection of products, you could take an AutoCAD drawing, and you could bring that into Inventor as the starting point for your model, or maybe to help position your model where it needs to go. You then could do things like cable wire harness, or CAM, or FEA within Inventor.

Then we can do marketing stuff, like create videos and pictures within Max. We can, like we talked about before, use ReCap to bring the point cloud data. We can use Navisworks to pull all that data together. So, with all that software in there, they all kind of talk to each other, and you can put data back and forth between them.

The last little area we want to look at is within manufacturing. And that's why Kevin's here, this is his specialty. Move on to the next slide. So, within the manufacturing realm, what we can do is, we can do CAM, we can do 3-D printing, or at least prepping your model for 3D printing. And there's a whole realm of stress analysis. And that too, that area within Autodesk is all connected.

So, if I start a stress analysis, do an FEA analysis within Inventor Professional, I can actually push that into sim-mechanical, I can push that into CFD. And they all kind of talk to each other. So, even if you're using, let's say, Robot Structural, you can push that up. Or you could bring information from the Inventor FEA, into Robot Structural. So even at a stress analysis area, they all talk to each other.

So, then what that brings us at the end, is all these components together. So this is the last slide and then Kevin's going to take over. But as you can see, we've got all these areas that are connected. And Inventor is kind of the hub to it, where we can bring in data from different sources. We can communicate with people outside. They can communicate with us. Everything stays associative, so if it changes in one place, we can push that change all the way around. So connected collaboration, communication, and manufacturing.

So now, Kevin's going to take us through a few things here. I should also say, if you guys had questions, we're a small group here, we can just throw them out. I'll either answer it, or I'll say, wait till later, or I'll say, I'll use the AutoDesk term and we'll take it offline. But if you've got a question, just [INAUDIBLE] and we'll do our best to answer it. I think that's to exit the slide show. There we go.

KEVIN ELLINGSON: Okay, so first thing I'll talk about is AnyCAD. Has anybody tried AnyCAD at all, any form of it? Okay. So AnyCAD's pretty cool, as Mike was saying. Let's make sure this is as big as it can be. I'm going to start a new file. And I'm just going to open a blank file. So now, I'm just going to open something, and I'm going to choose to open a SolidWorks file. And I don't have SolidWorks loaded on this machine, so I'm kind of going to duplicate the process of what would happen if you're working with a vendor that uses SolidWorks files.

But I'll just open up this first SolidWorks file. You get this dialog box that pops up, and it's asking you, do you want to reference this, keep in its native format or do you want to convert it to in Inventor format? Once you convert it to an Inventor format, you've broken that link back to the original native file. If you leave it referenced, you'll see what'll happen in a minute.

So we'll just go ahead and hit Open. Nothing really crazy about this part but, the area I'd like you guys to focus on when I open this next model is right about where the slot is. So, I'm just going to go into Windows Explorer and duplicate this process. So it's from my desktop.

Okay. So, here's those two SolidWorks files, basically one was created, then the next version was created and saved as the new name, so I could duplicate what the process was. So, I'm just going to take the one that I opened up, and I'm going to rename it so Inventor stops looking at it. And then I'm going to take this 2D chamfer and rename it as the first one.

As soon as I hit the Enter button, you're going to notice this little lightning bolt light up. So, there, that's lit up. Inventor now goes, oh look at that, there's a new revision of this SolidWorks file that's in this. Did you want to update it? So again, if you keep your eye on this little slot right here, when I hit the Update button, that slot gets bigger.

So, I can constrain to this, I can do things with it. If the vendor sends me a new file, I don't have to start over, I don't have a re-import, break all the things that have breaks, reconstrain it, reposition it, and do my drawings over. I can just keep it in the same, format that it was in.

So, to go a little farther with that, I'm going to open up a STEP file. For me, this is one of the great things, again I'm going to reference in the STEP file, keep it native linked. I work with a lot of people who do CNC machining, and their job shops, and they get a lot of file formats from different CAD people. They don't care about what the CAD format is. They want to put tool paths on the parts, and before they hit the Cycle Start button, if the engineer comes back and says, stop, wait, we made a bunch of changes, in the past that would have been not good because you pretty much start from scratch, or do a lot of work.

This is going to be kind of a simplistic example, but, a side note is anybody here doing any CAM work at all. Have you tried HSM yet?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I've used HSM.

KEVIN ELLINGSON: Okay, cool. So it's-- HSM is just-- it's a really good pickup by Audodesk, it's really easy to use fast CAM software. So, I'm just going to switch the CAM tab, and we're going to do something called the set up. This is how we prepare a model to tell the CNC machine how to run. So, I'll just get my work coordinate system set up, decide where I want to put that on my part. And I'm going to add a couple of tool paths. So, I'll just do a quick face, I'll grab a facing tool, click Okay.

There, you can see the tool path generates the face, the part off, and then I'll come back and view a 2D adaptive to clean out that pocket. Tutorial inch, we want a half-inch cutter. For the geometry, I'm going to select this bottom face. Go ahead and click Okay. And you'll see a tool path gets generated.

So now, again let's go back into my documents. And if I were to go and rename this STEP file, again, when I hit Enter, we should see the lightning bolt come on. It did. If I come and I regenerate this now, you'll see the pocket got much larger. My two tool paths now show a red x next to them. So, it's telling me that these tool paths are no longer in sync with the model.

Typically what we would do in a traditional CAM software, we would throw it all away, start working again. With AnyCAM-- AnyCAD I should say, AnyCAD inside a CAM, I'll right-click on my setup, tell it I wanted to generate all the tool paths, and now my tool paths now understand what the change was made, even though this is a STEP file, it's able to work with different versions as if it was a native Inventor file, working through the design changes.

Any questions on AnyCAD, AnyCAM type functionality, so far?

MIKE THOMAS: So, for those who are aren't on 2017, AnyCAM was actually introduced in 2016. So, they made some minor changes to it in 2017 but you do have access to it if you're on 2016.

AUDIENCE: 2016, you can't reference STEP files, right? It has to convert?

KEVIN ELLINGSON: No, 2016, you should be able to reference STEP files.

MIKE THOMAS: I think that came in '17.

KEVIN ELLINGSON: Oh, it did? Okay, I lied. 2017 STEP files. Okay, so another environment that we have built inside in Inventor, we go to the environments tab, and we're going to see the 3D printing tab. So under 3D printing tab, I'm just going to choose that, it's going to open me up into a new window. In this case, we can set the orientation. We can kind of reposition our part within the box. The box shown right here would be the printer that I'm using, and the print bed size, so I can kind of get my part position as I want to. It's also got some cool tools. If I had a part that was too big for the printer that I was making, I can partition the part, break it up, and build that print in multiple stages.

So, once you're happy with the results, one thing we could do is generate an STL, which most printers want. I'm just going to put this out on the desktop, and we'll call this-- enter. Part-- we'll just call it that. We'll go ahead and hit Save. So we'd send it to our printer. If you had-- you could put Print Studio on your computer as well, which is another free Autodesk product that helps you do some more manipulating of 3D printing objects. I'm just going to go and exit the 3D print.

And this will give me another opportunity to show that we can work with STL files. So, if I go over to the manage tab, there's an Import button, and on the Import button-- go to my desktop-- and I'm going to tell it that I want to look for STL files, and when I do that I should see my Interop file right here. Go ahead and open it. And now what I've opened up, this is a mesh, it's not really a real solid. You can do a limited work with it. We do have some tools now though that will help us with that.

On the 3D model tab, you'll see that we have the fit mesh face, so I can do things, convert faces, edges, cylinders, to real geometry. Kind of a manual process. It works somewhat reliably. I mean, the more complex your model, the more difficulty you're going to have with it.

There's also another tool that Autodesk makes. We'll put a link to this in our documentation for the class so you can go and find this tool. But what it will let me do is take this STL file, right-click on it, and say, I want to convert it to a base feature. I want to choose a solid that I want to convert it to. And if you'll notice, the faces are triangles, STL files are basically just triangles fitted to whatever shape they need to make up. When I click OK, you'll see the triangles disappear off the flat faces. So, if I go ahead and click OK here, does this little conversion

So, now it's found all the planar faces and things like that, and it's capped those, and made those smooth. On the edges, we still-- it just kind of took the triangular faces and converted them to solid geometry that are triangles. But at least now with this, I have a solid body. I could machine it or constrain it better, things like that. Any questions on any of the STL files? Import/ export?

AUDIENCE: So, with the mesh file, will it import STL and OBJ, I think, the two file formats?

KEVIN ELLINGSON: Yeah. I don't know if anybody had tried a mesh model prior to 2017, but more than just the tools, also the performance. So used to be, you'd bringing in a mesh model in 2016, and it would bring your system to its knees, even something like this. It was just so many faces for it to deal with. So I don't know what kind of black magic they are doing now, but the performance is significantly better with mesh models than it was before.

Okay, so the next one, I know we're in an Inventor, class but we're talking about using Inventor data, and we're going to talk about using Inventor data in Fusion a little bit. So, I'm going to-- if you haven't seen Fusion, this is Fusion. There's really no file open in Fusion. The way you get data in is to import it into your cloud account. It converts and gives you a file you can work with.

So, I'm going to open up my data panel. I'm going to click on the plus to add my file, go to my desktop again, and I want to import this Inventor file. I'm going to upload it. It's going to take a second to upload.

Anybody, ever created a design that got such a complex design history, or was designed in such a way that there was no real way to back yourself out of making the changes you want to do, because there were so many feature dependencies on there? If you ever have, this might be a good workflow to get you to make that geometry change that you need, a little bit easier using direct modeling.

So hopefully the internet's not too slow in here. Give it a couple minutes. How many people have tried Fusion so far? Definitely something to keep your eye on in the future, along with Inventor. We were at a lunch with-- Carl Bass was speaking. And he gave Inventor 5 to 10 plus years, so, if you're sitting on inventor, there's no panic that it's going disappear overnight.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KEVIN ELLINGSON: We'll tell you what, Mike, what do you think about doing an audible? I'll let this run, well, maybe we can save this section at the very end.

MIKE THOMAS: Sure, yeah, because it didn't take this long before. The internet connection must be a bit--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KEVIN ELLINGSON: Exactly. And there's no way it's going to manage the 100,000 files I've got in Vault, either. Whoops. All right, so what I want to show here, if my mouse would come back, is kind of a different form of the AnyCAD functionality, is that we can do what's called a DWG underlay. So I'm going to create a new assembly. In that assembly I'm going to create a new component. Let's say we'll just call this floor for right now. And I'm going to position this so this actually is the floor.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the manage tab, and I'm going to do an import. And one of the things that we can do is we can actually import AutoCAD drawing files. So kind of the same thing as the AnyCAD-- that's not the drawing-- is that we can bring this in as a reference. I'm just getting a message because it's outside my project file. But we can bring this in without the need to convert it. So I'm getting another message because I haven't saved my file yet.

So, what it's doing is almost like an AutoCAD xref, is that it's bringing this in an associative fashion, so I can place it within my part, I can locate where I want it, and then I'm able to use that in different means. One might be to project geometry, one might be just to use it to position objects.

So, now I've got this AutoCAD drawing attached here as a reference. What I'd like to do is bring in this assembly, and let's bring this assembly in and let's just drop it in there. So I'm just going to do a copy, and we'll paste that in there. And then what I can do is, I can use regular constraints, and constrain this to the AutoCAD drawing.

So, I could take, let's say, this plane, really, I can take this plane, and what maybe I'd like to do is I'd like to constrain it to that line. And then maybe I'd like to take the edge here on this foot, and let's constrain it to this purple box here in this.

So, now I've used that AutoCAD drawing to position. And if we take that purple box, and let's just move it, and we'll save it, when we go back into Inventor, same lightning bolt, and what we'll see is that the purple box is going to move. And since that assembly is constrained to the purple box, it's also going to update as well. Hopefully.

So, you can see that I didn't have to convert any geometry, there was no copy and pasting, re-constraining, anything like that. I was able to attach it as what's called an underlay, but it's really the same as using the AnyCAD functionality. The original AutoCAD drawing changes, then it updates within Inventor.

Now, we can also kind of do it the opposite way. So, I've created a drawing of that assembly, and what I'd like to do is, I'd like to reference and use that geometry inside of AutoCAD. So I'm going to use what's called the Design Center. And if you don't use AutoCAD, the design center is just a way to access content within a drawing without having to open it. So you can access layers and blocks and things like that.

So, I'm going to take a drawing view. So when you save in Inventor a drawing, whether it's a DWG, or an IDW, you can go into AutoCAD, you can use the Design Center, and you can drag and drop it, and insert those views in as blocks. So now I could take that block, I could position it within the layout, make sure everything is going to fit.

Now, the same thing works, is that if it changes in Inventor, obviously, so let's change the level of detail here. So, since it's a block in AutoCAD, it's not going to update automatically, so we'll just save that drawing. But what I can do is, using the Design Center, I can quickly redefine the block. So, by redefine the block, in a sense, it's going to go through and update that block anyways for me.

So, I go back to the Design Center, I can right click, I can do a redefine, and what we're going to see is that the view wasn't quite updated yet in Inventor, so I get the green squares. But once that view is updated in Inventor, then you can redefine the block.

Something that's also pretty cool about this, is with that block inserted into AutoCAD, you can actually explode it, and you get the lines. Now obviously, it's not going to be associative anymore at that point, you won't be able to redefine. But if you just need a view of that model as 2D lines, sometimes the easiest way, insert the view through a block, explode it, and you got the lines. There's no save as, no worrying about layers, or things like that. You just drop it in, and you save as, and it updates.

So, that's just a couple of different ways that we can deal with AutoCAD data. So, we're into AutoCAD. So you can use the DWG underlay, bring it in, and you can use the Design Center to bring blocks into your AutoCAD drawing.

Something else that we can do from an Autodesk perspective, is we can work with Alias Design Data. I'm not sure-- anybody use Alias? Not one? Anybody know what Alias is? No? I won't spend very much time on this, then. So, the idea behind the Alias, is that it creates surfaces. It's basically an industrial tool for sketching kind of free form surfaces.

So, you can see here that I'm using the AnyCAD idea here, and I'm associating this Alias waterfall. So the same thing will happen. I've got all these surfaces within the Alias file, I can pick and choose which ones I want to bring in. But again, it's going to stay associative to the Alias file. Now, let's take this-- let's actually save this. What should we call this. Let's call this Alias . I'm going to use this as an opportunity to talk about something else. So this doesn't necessarily have to be coming from Alias. I don't know why I keep pasting-- trying to paste over there.

Anyway, I'm going to create a new part. And what I want to show is this tool that's called copy object. So, copy object will work anywhere and everywhere. So, I'm going doing it off an Alias file. You can actually use copy object on another Inventor part file. You could do it off a STEP file, you can do off a SolidWorks file, or you can do it off all these different-- they're different files. And the idea is that you can copy these objects.

So I'm going to copy faces. Because I only really want to deal with a couple of faces from this Alias model. And notice the associative option. So, the idea is, I'm going to copy these objects into my new part, and it'll stay associative. So, now I've brought in an Alias file using AnyCAD, I've now copied objects into a new part file, and I'm going to use these faces that I brought in, and I can use the thickness feature.

Okay, I shouldn't have done it as a composite. But the idea here is I could take this now, and I can do a thicken, and I can thicken that face, to get a solid model. So then if my Alias model changed, it would update with AnyCAD, the data that I copied object would update, and then turn my part would update. So, copy object is one of those little hidden tools because it's kind of buried in the modify drop-down, but again, it works for anything. I could have an Inventor part file, and I could copy a face from Inventor part file into another part file. And I've got this link that I could sever or maintain to make sure it updates.

Another format that we can work with, which has actually been Inventor for quite a while, is IDF files. And they keep working on the options that we can do with IDF files. And if you were an IDF file, where would you be?

So, really, what this is, is this is a PCB board that was generated in a different piece of software. We actually use the Eagle software at work, that's become the Fusion schematic PCB information, but this is where it came from. And IDF has been in Inventor for as long as I can remember. So IDF has been in Inventor since, I don't know 2010, 2009. In the past couple releases, what they did is, they provided the ability to actually recognize your Content Center components, so instead of it generating brand new components each time you bring it in, it'll actually look through your Content Center, and say, oh yeah, you already have one of those components, and whether it's a terminal or something else, and actually replace that. So you're getting your component with your iproperties, and your information.

In this case, I don't have any, so if I do a check, it's just going to come up and say I can't find any of them. But you can see that it is going to do that check. So I'm click okay, and what we're going to see is that it's going to create for me a new assembly, and within that assembly will be all the components. Now, I picked to do it as an assembly, but I could have easily done it as a part, and it would have came in as a multi Solid part file. So there's the board, now it's placing the components, and I could take this and then paste it into and constrain it.

Okay, so one more quick one here, and then we'll turn back over to Kevin so he can-- what do I want to do? So, let's change the representation. And let's look at the little blue box here that obviously everybody in this room ignored when they put 2017 on their machine. What we're able to do is, we're able to use this and create a design share.

So what this is utilizing is, this is utilizing A360, as you can see up in the corner there, so you're utilizing A360. So the idea is that it will take your model, and basically publish it to this lightweight format using the A360 viewer, and generate a link for you. You send that link to somebody else, and they can hop on, and see your model in real time, and they don't require an A360 account. You require and A360 account to publish, but they don't require an A360 account to view it. They can add comments, they can take a look at your model, and then when you're done, you just kill the design share, and the file goes off into no man's land, never to be seen again.

So it gives you this real quick ability to push it to A360, collaborate with somebody, and then remove it. So, you can see right now, it's going to share what's currently visible on the screen. So, I'm just going to start a design view. We'll give it a name. We'll give it some content. We can include components, we can include the part properties, and then directly from here, you can also send an email and say, hey, take a look at this. But I'll start the design share, and you can see that it's extracting the 3D graphics.

So we might have as much success as Kevin had going to the cloud. Yeah, I think this connection might be overburdened. I switched to my phone, and as soon as I switched the connection on my phone line, everything happened almost instantaneously.

KEVIN ELLINGSON: We'll give 30 seconds. So, as you can see, we took the model as it was, so which components were visible. So I'm able to pan, zoom, you can even do these exploded views, or you can expose the components part. There is a bottle tree so can see the components there within it. You can interrogate the model, get some properties on it. And then you can see that there is the ability to do comments.

So, right now there is no ability to add comments directly in the model, leaders or dimensions. It will come. But right now it gives you this ability to quickly publish your model, shoot the link to somebody else, you guys can collaborate, and then you can make the share go away. I'll float it back to you.

MIKE THOMAS: Okay, so here I am back in Fusion. My model published. Here it is, this Intro to Inventor, or Intro to 2D Machine Part. I'm going to right-click on it, and say that I'd like to open it. So now, I've opened this file. And you'll notice that there's maybe some-- we don't get the Inventor feature history tree. It's gone through and done some automatic feature recognition for us, which works okay. We'll talk a little bit about what you can do instead.

But let's just say-- there's four fillets in the back side, and if I switch my units here from millimeters to inches, maybe what I'd like to do is, I brought this in, this is an imported model, but I would like to change these four dimensions. So, I'm going to right-click on my fillet here, and say Edit, and now I could give it a bigger value, say, like 0.2. The fillet updates, click okay. This is being done history-free, there's no parametric history for this, but we can still do some editing.

Another thing you could do is-- so this is all part feature recognition. I could right-click on these features and say dissolve, and now all those all those features have gone away. However I can still kind of-- sometimes Fusion doesn't group things the way I would like it to, or maybe I want-- there's four fillets here, maybe I'd want those all to be linked as one feature. So under the create, I'll go through and say, find features. I'll unchecked the select-all, and say I just want to find fillets, and the fillets I want to find are that one, and that one, and that one, and that one. And we'll go ahead and click okay.

So, now I get a fillet, I can right-click on it, and edit it again. It's found out what the value is. I'll switch to something big like 0.2. Click okay. Now we've got, again, non-parametric history-based direct modeling. Fusion is also really great, like I said, I've done this before. I just need to make one small change, but there are so many features that are dependent down the road on that change that I'm going to do, it's going to break a lot of stuff. Now, the Fusion has really great direct modeling, so maybe I don't want this hole, I'll just come delete it. Maybe I don't want this chamfer. I'll delete it.

It self-heals-- okay, so then I'll go ahead, delete that off-- so you can just delete chamfer or push-pull, maybe I want to make this the top surface of this part a little thicker, so I'll right-click and say press pull, grab the top face, drag it up to the value that I want so that you can see these chamfers are giving me a little bit of an issue. I could go and delete those and redo this instead. Let's just do that.

So let's click on the chamfer and delete it. You can control select them as well so we don't have to wait all day. So I'm going to get rid of my chamfers, now I can right-click press-pull. Do that design change, that might be really hard to do in a parametric based design when I have my history that is kind of locking me in a corner. I get my design change made, and again, this is all about getting data in and out of Inventor.

So now, once I make those changes, I could go to my menu, tell it that I would like to export this. I would like to save this as a STEP file. Choose where to save it, I'll save it on my desktop, it should go out there. And now we can come back into Inventor, open a file, there's that intro to machine STEP, I could open it.

Again, it's asking me if I want to stay linked to the STEP file that I created. So, I could continue to make design changes in Fusion, and re-exporting those back out as STEP with the same name. When it overwrote it inside of the computer, you would get that, update that, the changes have been made, you want to update it, and you can update it, and all those design changes will follow through into Inventor. So click OK, and there's my there's my model that's been changed from Fusion back into Inventor. So, just another tool in the toolbox to do some editing as need be.

MIKE THOMAS: Are there any questions?

AUDIENCE: I've got a quick question about-- so, we've got another customer that we work with, they send us their STEP files, and they also us Inventor. They send us the STEP files though. A single Step FILE. When we import them, if we reference, does it just keep that single STEP file? The problem we've been having is we've been like, bring it, every single part in assembly.

MIKE THOMAS: It basically will treat it like a multi Solid part. You get a single reference. Yeah and then similar to what would I do with the Alias file. You can switch the second tab and click Load, it will list all the components in there, and you could say I don't want these ones. So might be 500 parts in there, you only want 100. But still one STEP file, one reference within Inventor model.

AUDIENCE: So then, like you said-- we've never referenced them. So, say he sends us a new step file. How do we get it to update? Replace it?

KEVIN ELLINGSON: Just replace it. Don't change the name. Make sure it's the same name. Replace it, Inventor will-- keep it the same name, Inventor will say, oh, look at this, there has been a change made, did you want to update this? And you hit the Update button. Because, if you look, let's see if I still have open. This SolidWorks file is a feature in my history, in my design tree now. So, it's--

MIKE THOMAS: No, they can't see you. It's like that doesn't look like anything.

KEVIN ELLINGSON: I'm sorry. So, I switch to SolidWorks file I used earlier. In my browser, this is the inserted SolidWorks file, but if you look, my Inventor part file is named nothing, it's still just a generic part, so if I were to say my file, it now knows that this is part of the history. So you drop that in your directory, wherever it's supposed to be stored. You open that file again, Inventor goes, whoa, look at that, there's a change, wants to know if you want to hit the lightning bolt and make the update.

MIKE THOMAS: And that's a good point, because Kevin inserted into a part file, that you could just place it into an assembly file, so you have either method you want to work with. Yeah, like I said, it's one of the best features in Inventor, easily in the past five years. Were you on 2017? Yeah. So it should make a big difference for with that those STEP files.

KEVIN ELLINGSON: And again, every year they seem to make it a little bit better, the way AnyCAD works, and the reliability, and what it's able to do.

MIKE THOMAS: So just to expand on the DWG underlay, is, I'm going to import, again I'm going to import an AutoCAD drawing file. And I'm going to pick the view I want to drop this in, and I'm going to pick an origin. I'm getting messages because, again, I didn't see my part file.

So, it gives you a message right away that you've inserted this file, and there's a project command if you want to use the geometry. Now, before I do that though, I'm going to right-click on this option here. And notice the ability to suppress the link and break the link. So just like derived parts, if you don't want this to update real time, you can suppress that link so that they can change the drawing all they want, and until you unsuppress the link, it won't update.

But they also do things like redefine, reposition, I can also do layer visibility. So if there's certain layers in there that you didn't want to see, so maybe I didn't want to see the dimensions, maybe I didn't want to see the hidden lines, I can actually pick and choose which objects I want to bring in. Reference. And I can also reposition it, so perhaps what I'd like to do is, I'd like to translate it, because I'd like to change the position of it, so maybe what we want to do is, I want to change the origin point, because I want the origin point to be that corner instead.