Description
Key Learnings
- Compare the functionality in Inventor and Fusion 360
- Discover the strengths of Inventor
- Discover the strengths of Fusion 360
- Understand how Inventor and Fusion 360 can coexist
Speakers
DAN BANACH: So we will start on time. Appreciate everyone being here. I know that we're competing against a main stage. So no pressure on us, Jay.
JAY TEDESCHI: None at all.
DAN BANACH: All right. So the cool part is this is going to be an interactive session. So I'm not sure how many of you have done this interactive stuff. Have you? If not, you can get on your phones, iPads, any devices and go to that URL. We'll leave that on the screen here for a second.
CREW: There's some microphone issues?
DAN BANACH: Is the microphone-- can you guys hear me the back? No?
JAY TEDESCHI: How about me? Can you guys hear me?
CREW: Let's try get this--
JAY TEDESCHI: That's Rosa's seat.
ROSA: Yeah, that's me. [LAUGHS]
DAN BANACH: All right. Did everybody get the URL? Did everybody get the URL that wants the URL? All right. So this is going to be a really fast-moving class, so let's get rolling.
So first of all, we'll start off with some introductions. So my name is Dan Banach. So I work in the Education Group at Autodesk. And I've been working with CAD since 1988, started off with AutoCAD release 9. How many of you are earlier than that? A few of you? All right. So we'll have drinks later, it'll be fun.
So I was in reseller channel for 19 years. I've been at Autodesk now for five years. I believe this is my 18th and 19th year speaking at Autodesk University. And I'm also a published author. As you can see, I have 23 books, most of those are on Inventor. And joining me on my left-- your right-- is Mr. Jay Tedeschi. Jay, you want to introduce yourself?
JAY TEDESCHI: I think you're doing a good job. I'm Jay Tedeschi. Technical marketing specialist, Autodesk. I've been here-- it's my 23rd year at Autodesk, my 20-- it's either 20th and 21st AU. And that's kind of--
DAN BANACH: And just all around great guy, so actually--
JAY TEDESCHI: Are you asking for like a bio? I'm like, I can't think of anything to write.
DAN BANACH: All right. So enough about us. So this is where you guys can interact. So if you go to that URL that was up there, you can tell us a little bit about your experience. So what is your main CAD system? So if you are working 60 hours a week, what do you spend at least 31 hours on? That was humor, by the way. I apologize, it will not get any better in the next hour. So what are our results?
CREW: Is this going to be in your way?
DAN BANACH: We're good. All right, so mostly Inventor. Cool. High, high percentage. All right.
So our learning objectives-- so hopefully everyone also got the class handout. Did everybody else download that? So what we're not going to do is go through that line by line. You guys can read that, so we won't insult you on that. But also notice in that handout, I put in a bunch of hyperlinks so you can learn more about what Jay and I are going to talk about this morning.
So our goal here is really to highlight what Jay and I think are the strengths in both Inventor and Fusion. So we should have a little caveat. So what we are going to present are the opinions of Dan and Jay, not necessarily those of others. And later you guys can give us your opinion too.
All right. So first of all, we're going to start off with just a quick overview. So what is Fusion? So there are about 5% of you that are using Fusion, so that means 95% don't know a lot about it. So Fusion is Autodesk's latest CAD system. It's cloud-enabled. And think of Fusion as more of a platform.
So just running through some quick videos here, so the files are saved up in the cloud, but the really built-in collaboration is really cool. So here we can go back and you can start doing some red lining. Now these red linings that we're going to do are actually going to show up in Fusion as a comment. So here we can go back, we can do our T-splines, which I'll get into a little deeper later.
And of course, we have our traditional modeling that you would expect, right? Drawing lines, arcs, circles, extrudes, ribs, fillets, all that good stuff. And of course, everybody needs to do drawings? Yeah? Maybe? Maybe not? We'll talk about that as we roll through.
And then of course we have simulation. And the cool part with Fusion, when we're running these simulations, we can run them local or we can choose to send it up to the cloud, free up our computer, which is really cool.
Then we have the manufacturing. So HSM is built entirely into Fusion. So the nice part is, again, if the models would change, the tool path will automatically get updated. And of course, we give you some really cool tools for doing 3D printing, and it runs on a window in a Mac. And we also have a preview version that runs in a cloud for parts.
All right. So Jay, you want to talk a little bit about the Inventor side?
JAY TEDESCHI: Sure. This is just going to be a quick overview of-- similar to what you just saw for Fusion. Just kind of like a higher level overview of functionality in Inventor 2018 currently. So go ahead and hit that.
This is a fairly good-sized assembly, there's probably about 2,000 parts in here. And what we're looking at here is essentially the integration of document management within the workflow, and we're able to incorporate markups in Vault so that all the users on this project are notified when markup is essentially added to the project.
Once we enact or start to enact on that ECO, we're able to very quickly go in and search the entire Vault database for specific files. Now this thing-- what we were looking for was that clamp assembly, and they're looking to lightweight the clamp assembly. So we were able to very quickly find that data, use copy design and make a new copy of it, and now we're going to make a different version of this clamp utilizing Shape Generator.
Now what Shape Generator allows us to do is isolate specific areas of functionality. That's why you see those circles in that square, those are joints. That's where the part is-- there's an actuator that's loaded upon it where it pivots. And Shape Generator essentially takes-- it does finite element analysis in the background and determines the minimum amount of material required to meet the structural requirements of the usage. So we're able to then create on an optimized component based on that calculation that is then incorporated into the assembly.
From there, validation is a very important part of this workflow to ensure that the part that we created will work. Perhaps the Shape Generator tool doesn't take into account long-term fatigue analysis. So we're able to utilize Nastran in CAD, in Inventor to determine whether or not long-term or not this part is going to be viable.
We can run it through-- Nastran in CAD does non-linear, it does fatigue analysis, it's a very, very full-featured analysis suite. As you can see, it looks like the lifetime-- the service life of this part is going to be sufficient. So we're able to like give the OK on that.
And finally, let's take a look at some of the manufacturing capabilities in Inventor. This is with HSM as well, similar manufacturing tool to what we have in Fusion 360. Allows you to do setup sheets, adaptive clearing. It's a very, very capable-- up to five-axis milling, turning, it's a wire EDM, it is a very, very capable cam system. And again, you can create setup sheets, the tool libraries are totally customizable, it has posts for pretty much every controller you could imagine.
Finally, one of the nice things about it is, it's adaptive. So s the part that we select to create our tool paths from updates, the tool paths automatically update as well. Did the animation just stop?
DAN BANACH: That's the end of our video.
JAY TEDESCHI: You stopped it? OK. Go to the next slide then.
DAN BANACH: All right. So of course, everyone is probably here, right? So we have a bunch of Inventor users, but the big question always is, can I utilize that Inventor data in the Fusion data? How many of you are at the main stage yesterday when Amy announced some of the AnyCAD stuff? A few of you? Right.
So what we're going to roll through next, we're going to take a look at the functionality both in Fusion Inventor that Jay and I like, and then at the end we'll be bringing it together. So it's not necessarily a choice-- do I have to use Inventor or Fusion? We believe the answer is both.
JAY TEDESCHI: And if you're Collection customer-- the whole reason we decided to do this class was because if you're a Collection customer, you have both these tools now. And both of them excel in specific areas. There's a lot of common functionality in both-- a lot, but there are also areas where one has functionality that accentuates what the other one does.
A good example, we don't really show it, but at the end of the session today we'll be doing some AnyCAD. And if you kind of like think out of the box right now, Fusion handles printed wiring board design via EAGLE, and Inventor handles cable and wire harness design exceptionally well via AutoCAD Electrical.
So the two of those can now share files back and forth with AnyCAD. So you conceivably could very quickly come up with a workflow where I have an electromechanical assembly and I get some guy sitting somewhere doing pre-wiring board design with Fusion, we're sharing the bulk of the design files back and forth via AnyCAD, and the guy in Inventor is doing the cable and wire harness to connect up everything, and the guy in Fusion is doing the printed wiring board design.
If you are Collections customer, there's a lot of functionality that can be exposed with both of these tools. So it's not an either/or proposition, it's like, where can I use both? And how can I use both?
DAN BANACH: Perfect. All right. So again, as we roll through these next slides here, hopefully you'll see something inside the products that you didn't know existed as well. It'd be another bonus for this class.
So let's take a look at the modeling. So inside of Fusion here, we're going to-- again, I'll just roll with the videos here. So first of all, we're going to go back into this cutter, right? So what we can do is place in an image here, maybe an industrial designer did. We can use that as a canvas, we can place in some dimensions on there so we know the size of that.
And then we have our T-spline environment. So think of T-splines like modeling with clay. So I work in the Education Group, so we always say, with the teacher, no mess, right? So we can push, pull, or drag. We can grab edges, faces, points, things that would be difficult to go back and do with parametric modeling are super easy to do with T-splines. So if you've never seen this before, this is pretty cool.
JAY TEDESCHI: Plus, you're able to define planes of symmetry. So any change that he makes on one side is immediately mirrored to the other. You can have symmetry in a T-spline component on all three axes depending on-- it gives you a lot of flexibility with regard to quickly making changes.
DAN BANACH: And so here, we're showing some of the collaboration. So we can actually do a live review. So on the right-hand side, someone maybe on the other side of the world they can see on the screen that you're working on. We don't have to setup a GoToMeeting or anything like that.
So also with Fusion, we have versions. So every time we save a file, it's a version-controlled. So we can always go back to a previous version, which is way cool.
So here we're, again, just looking at it in the cloud. And again, we can add comments to that. And again, these comments will actually show back up inside of Fusion, which is pretty cool.
So Jay, you wanna walk us through the Inventor modeling side?
JAY TEDESCHI: Yeah. This one-- we thought this complemented the Fusion example because what he was working with was a consumer product that was like one of those cutters. And you saw how we were able to use the T-spline functionality to essentially make something that was not only aesthetically pleasing, but functionally comfortable.
So we'll take that a step further and let's start expanding on that consumer part design with some plastic part features. So go right ahead and hit it. And I'll actually do a little bit of T-spline modeling myself here, albeit a little bit differently. My purpose here in using it was that it enabled me to very, very quickly create a shape that was symmetric and adhered to the sketch profiles that I wanted to.
So essentially we're able to do pretty much the same type of push-pull functionality on the body that you saw in the Fusion video a moment before. This is exactly the same-- this functionality exists in both products. I was trying to see if I could-- this is traditionally something that you'd have to do in a very rigid and straightforward fashion when you're doing traditional BREP modeling extrusions and drafts, and I just wanted to see-- it was actually very, very quick and easy utilizing the T-spline environment, and then I just joined it up to the rest of the plastic part and boom.
Here we have some of the other plastic part features which are specific to the plastic design environment in Inventor. This is a built-in boss that can do bosses for both sides. So both of the mating parts on a mating boss is on a top and bottom cover. Here we see putting in a grill. Again, these are pre-made routines, you don't have to sketch this up and then do a combination of Booleans to get to a certain point where you can create that.
And then finally, another beautiful thing about the Inventor environment is that it has built into it this Moldflow Advisor. Moldflow Adviser allows me to analyze the actual flow or the filling of the mold with plastic for any plastic part that I design. It's basically showing me areas that are not failing as quickly as the other areas, and I'm maybe-- that we have a warning there that the quality is going to be somewhat less than optimum because of the mold. So then you'd have to change the design somewhat, have some additional gates. This very, very capable analysis tool built right in.
DAN BANACH: OK.
JAY TEDESCHI: Go.
DAN BANACH: So the plastic part features rock. All right. So configuration. So this is huge. So think about having like a family of parts. So we'll start off here inside in Inventor with iParts, iAssemblies, iFeatures. So how many of you have ever worked with these? A lot. OK, so I'll go fast.
So of course we already have some iParts already created, so we jumped right to the iAssemblies. We kind of assumed that there would be a lot of experience in here. So this allows us to go back and create that configuration very, very easily.
And of course, you can see the results when you go back and you activate that. And it's very easy. Just right-click, Insert Rows, get your configuration the way that you would like it.
JAY TEDESCHI: Should've sped this one up.
DAN BANACH: This is our short version, so this will go fast. It'll be fine.
Now the nice part is we can take that iAssembly and make that a sub-assembly into a larger assembly. And you can keep going. So the ability to go back and re-utilize this geometry over multiple assemblies, it's unlimited what we can do there.
Then that takes us to our programming side with iLogic. Jay, you want to talk through this one?
JAY TEDESCHI: Sure.
DAN BANACH: This is a great example.
JAY TEDESCHI: So one of the APIs that we have built into Inventor is iLogic. Any of you guys use that? Oh wow, a lot. OK, cool.
DAN BANACH: So we'll go fast.
JAY TEDESCHI: Yeah, go right ahead. All right, so this is-- just basically just an Inventor assembly, and we have a lot of parametrically-driven features built into the wheel. What we're going to do with iLogic is to manipulate those features and turn it into-- we're going to build a little dialog box so that we can drive via the dialog box the configuration of the wheel itself.
So from those parameters that we had in the parameter list, those are accessible to us through the iLogic programming dialog box, and we'll just basically go in, take a look at the parameters, and then start adding them so that we can build a dialog box-- a pop-up dialog that will allow us to then go in and figure how many spokes we want, whether we want those spokes dished, whether we want holes in them, what color we want, what finish we want.
So here we go ahead and-- I think we're building the dialog box right here. Just picking the iLogic features we want to join into them. There's our now sample dialog box, now we can test it. And see, we just run down the list. Let's say, OK, this is how many spokes I want, these are whether I want it cut or not, this is the color we want.
And the beautiful thing about this is that, how many you guys-- do any of you guys push that to Configurator 360? Excellent. And that's exactly what I'm showing right here. So then taking that output from iLogic and pushing that automatically to Configurator 360 for e-commerce. If you had a web-based tool for people to buy your product, you could basically build this interface like-- it's almost-- I don't want to say like magic, but you don't have to do very much programming on the website at all because Configurator 360 just pushes that through.
That's it. You can like-- it's just like show and tell. I was just messing around on the web.
DAN BANACH: That is one expensive tire.
[LAUGHTER]
JAY TEDESCHI: That's on the Mono. That's a $250,000 car. So for someone to pop an extra $2,800, they're like-- ah. Last year when we did that latticed upright, those cost six grand apiece. The regular machine upright was $400, and Ian Briggs was saying, this is like a badge of courage for these guys. They get together at a meet and go, oh, you didn't pop the 28 grand for the additional-- like the uprights? Like, what are you, cheap? Yeah.
DAN BANACH: All right. So moving on, we got a little lesson there on prices of tires for racing.
JAY TEDESCHI: Yes.
DAN BANACH: All right. So additive manufacturing. So this is one of the favorite features of mine inside of Fusion. So how many of you are doing additive manufacturing? Not as many as I thought. So of course, obviously this is a huge trend that's moving. And one of the big questions we always get is about threads.
So with Fusion, we have the ability to go back and create two different types of threads. So the first 10 that we're going to place this in, I'm just going to place it in as cosmetic, meaning that it's just going to look somewhat like a thread, very similar to the way Inventor works. As you can see, it's based on standards.
But now when I go back and do a quick edit to this, we can turn on true modeled threads. Oooh. See? Did I not say that that was going to awe factor?
JAY TEDESCHI: That's lame.
DAN BANACH: So we were debating if we should do that.
JAY TEDESCHI: Yeah. That's why it's in there.
DAN BANACH: All right, moving on.
[LAUGHTER]
All right, scan data. So how many of you ever get scans or scan data? That came out wrong, didn't it? So Jay, you want to walk us through this? I know this is a model that you created, so this is pretty cool stuff.
JAY TEDESCHI: This is an example of a customer of ours that they race motorcycles. And they buy componentry from vendors. And for example, they had an Aprilia frame that they were dropping a different motor into-- it was a two-stroke motor-- and they needed to make some modifications to the frame. But they didn't have the model of the frame because it was purchased from a vendor. So they did-- go ahead and start it.
So they did a high resolution scan of the chassis itself. And then using the mesh tools that are built into Fusion 360, we're able to very quickly isolate the faces that we need to modify. Once those faces are selected, you can then grow-- basically grow the selection out to the edges of the where the weld is, and essentially what we're doing right here is we're trying to clean this up, because what we need to do ultimately is to create a replacement cross tube where the mounts for the motor are rotated somewhat from what these ones are.
So that's the reason why I'm cleaning this up. The whole goal here is so that what I am left with is a hybrid-- from that high resolution scan, I need to get rid of all of these pieces which are welded on so that I have a nice cylindrical-- solid cylindrical mesh body that I can then create sketch geo-- that's the whole goal of doing all the work that I'm doing right now is to get to that point where I can create this.
I need basically something that's one-to-one, and the sketch tools-- the scan tools in general-- the mesh tools that are in Fusion 360-- are extremely strong in that they allow you to extract this actual vector to the geometry from intersections with this mesh. So it essentially just goes around the mesh, the diameter, and then averages and says, OK, that's about the diameter right there.
So it's actually an editable-- I can then create BREP geometry from it. So now we're creating our clamp. Basically our clamp location relative to where the mount on the motor is. Now, this is going to be a separate component, so I'm just adding that additional part, and ultimately that will be a weldment.
So-- what just happened?
DAN BANACH: That was-- the video went to black.
JAY TEDESCHI: Did you get rid of the analysis?
DAN BANACH: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
This is my class.
JAY TEDESCHI: Next.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, it is. It is.
DAN BANACH: So in all fairness, so Jay had some really cool simulation but we're going to talk about it in a little bit.
JAY TEDESCHI: Right.
DAN BANACH: Jay's going to yell at me later.
JAY TEDESCHI: No, no. I mean, you're right, we were-- we were long.
DAN BANACH: All right, so the next part are the design accelerators inside of Inventor. How many of you are using design accelerators? So if we have 95% of you using Inventor, you're going to love design accelerators. So think about taking your engineer's handbook and putting it right inside of Inventor.
So of course, you can see the whole list. And these are documented, by the way, also in the handout.
JAY TEDESCHI: Where did you find that?
DAN BANACH: So, did some homework last night. So here we're going to place in a weld. So with the weld, of course I want to make sure that I'm going to place in the right size so it won't break. So very simple calculation, but replacing it right inside of Inventor. So then once we place that in, we know it's going work. Which is pretty, pretty cool.
JAY TEDESCHI: It essentially does the calculation and figures out for you what the optimum size of the weld is based on the geometry that you're selecting and the material that the weld's going to be.
DAN BANACH: Yep.
JAY TEDESCHI: And you can see where the weld's going to go, right down there.
DAN BANACH: So of course, we have the weld in there--
JAY TEDESCHI: --cut that out also.
DAN BANACH: The next part is-- so it will calculate the weight of all your welds. Now the next part that we're going to do is we're going to go back and we're going to place in a bearing. So again, think about how difficult it is to go back and do this. But the nice part, again, we're placing in our engineering data. So we make sure that we're just not placing a bearing, we're placing into the correct bearing.
JAY TEDESCHI: Now, the really cool thing about this is that it ties our content center in with the design accelerator. So when we were just browsing for a bearing, it wasn't in an isolated piece of functionality. When we were browsing for the bearing, we did so through Content Center. And then it selected for us the optimum bearing size. Go ahead, sorry.
DAN BANACH: That's fine. Then the last part here is with the bolted connection. Of course, bolts, pretty easy to go back and place that in, but again, we're going to tie this back into the calculation side. So I've seen a lot of people go back and use bolted connection, but have never touched the Calculation tab.
As my friends on the East Coast would say, wicked cool.
JAY TEDESCHI: Wicked pissa.
DAN BANACH: Pretty good? All right, so those of you that aren't using design accelerators, you have some homework. It will pay off, design accelerators are awesome.
All right. Large assemblies. So how many of you are working with assemblies, let's say, that are over 10,000 parts? The hands went up before I even threw out a number.
[LAUGHTER]
So of course, the nice part here is that we're going to talk through this with Inventor. So Fusion is cloud-based, so our capacity isn't quite to the level yet where we're at with Inventor. So maybe between Jay and I, we'll just talk through this one together. But when we start, we open up a file, we now can go into Express Mode where we're actually opening up cached data.
So you can see with this, this has over 10,000 parts and over 2,300 unique components. And what we're going to do here next-- and once we go back and we zoom into a specific area that I want to work on, then it will load itself into memory automatically, which is pretty cool. And of course, the creation of the drawings used is also critically important, so we're going to give you some tools there. We can go back and say, I just want to work on the raster data.
JAY TEDESCHI: And like he said, it's demand-based. So if it can create drawing views based on the cached graphic data, it will do so. Then you can choose to update for more accuracy later. I don't want to sit and wait 10 minutes to lay out four drawing views of a 50,000-part assembly. So you go with the cached data and it's really quick and fast, and then at some point in the future when you want to start dimensioning it, detailing it, that's when you need the actual geometric data sitting underneath.
DAN BANACH: Which is really nice. So of course, if you're working in a group environment, this is where the Defer Update would really work out well. If an assembly is updating every five minutes, you don't want to have that update hitting the drawing, so you're in complete control of that.
So I'd say-- my opinion, over the last two years, Inventor has done an awesome job working with capacity. Good?
JAY TEDESCHI: Yeah.
DAN BANACH: Structural steel. So the frame generator. How many of you have ever used the frame generator? We're nearing 50%.
JAY TEDESCHI: Do you use the analysis with it as well? Good.
DAN BANACH: You want to walk us through this one, Jay?
JAY TEDESCHI: Sure.
DAN BANACH: We'll just jump right to the video here.
JAY TEDESCHI: This is that same assembly we were using for the design accelerators. Essentially it's a large weldment based on standard structural steel components.
We start with a 3D wireframe that basically defines the center line of all of the structural steel components. So this was built basically with surfaces defining those center areas on each of the steel segments. Once that's done, the frame generator environment in Inventor allows us to essentially select from a standard-driven catalog, a standard steel section, and then build the frame with them as well as doing all the miter cuts, the trims, the joins, all-- basically essentially any different type of intersection that you can imagine for pieces of structural steel.
Right there we're using that large-- the four-by-four to do the cuts on the two-by-twos. And what you end up with-- you build from a very high level, and what you end up with is a really nice cut list of all the components that you're going to need to build this frame assembly.
Finally, once the frame assembly is done, it's a single step to get into the beam analysis, which-- if you don't have Beam Analysis, then you're really going to be spending a lot of time doing analysis on an assembly like this, because it has to do-- it basically has to mesh and then create the six or eight-node bricks on each of those physical components, whereas the beauty of beam analysis is this tool understands what the cross-section of data is for each one of those structural steel components. So it can calculate the strength based on the material and the section properties.
So that's why Beam Analysis is so much quicker. If you're doing frame design, this is really an optimized tool for using to do so.
DAN BANACH: I mean, the results when we placed those in are almost instantaneous, which is really cool.
JAY TEDESCHI: --a beam instead of-- yeah.
DAN BANACH: So mechanical engineers in the room go back to school, wish you had this, huh?
All right. Electromechanical. So we're going to first start off with Inventor. How many of you are doing anything with the wire harnesses on AutoCAD Electrical? So some?
JAY TEDESCHI: Not a lot of electromechanical design in here.
DAN BANACH: OK.
JAY TEDESCHI: All right. You want me to do it?
DAN BANACH: So go ahead, Jay.
JAY TEDESCHI: So obviously you edited this--
DAN BANACH: Yes I did.
JAY TEDESCHI: --significantly. So what you're missing here is that in Inventor, I was able to physically go in and actually place connectors, and then that connector list is then sent out and connected to AutoCAD Electrical. So what you're looking at was not me just out of the ether creating a cable harness and in AutoCAD electrical, it was Inventor physically driving the fact that, OK, you've got six connectors that need to be included in this harness design. So then when I get into AutoCAD Electrical, it's able to read in that connector list, and when I-- you cut that part too, didn't you? Where I was laying out the connectors and it showed the-- OK.
It actually shows-- when you're in AutoCAD Electrical, it shows you-- here's the list from Inventor, there are six connectors, you have two installed, you have four left to put in on your drawing. So the two environments are linked, and that is inherently advantageous because it eases the creation of the schematic in AutoCAD Electrical, and then you can read-- once I put all these wires back on, that data is then linked back into Inventor.
So the two documents live in basically unison with one another. As one updates, the other one does as well. OK, so more adding wires. All right, so here we are in Inventor. And what we're doing now is we're setting up the link between the two of them, determining which product is going to drive.
In this case we selected-- what we're looking at over there is the list now between the two environments of what is installed and what is not. So we're able to see that-- the list at the bottom, you can see, these are all the connectors. Once we have all the connectors in place, we can then read in the wires from AutoCAD Electrical-- and you see, there are the leads.
Now at this point, they're just going point to point, but we're then able to route them through the harnesses which we laid through our conduits. Finally, just automatic routing through all the un-routed wires. So there's the full cable harness. And then finally, the nailboard drawing of the harness.
Wow. People next door are really loud.
DAN BANACH: Or we're not loud enough.
JAY TEDESCHI: We have broom--
DAN BANACH: --that you didn't like.
JAY TEDESCHI: All right, so what we're doing right now is reading in that harness design from Inventor. This is in Inventor as well, the Nailboard utility. And what's really nice about this is that if you have actual models-- and we didn't use to do this. The first few releases of the nailboard, we're able to read in the actual physical connector from the environment-- from the model environment in Inventor, and then lay out views of those models for our connector.
So when we do the pinouts now-- and that's what we're doing right now, we're going to show the pinout display in the nailboard drawing-- and it is associated with the connector itself that was from the model. So it knows at either end of these cables, this is the connector that sits there.
DAN BANACH: Pretty cool.
JAY TEDESCHI: Yeah. You can just go to the next one.
DAN BANACH: So the next one, PCB boards. Anyone doing PCB boards? A few of you? So this was an acquisition that Autodesk did a few years ago with EAGLE CAD. So the nice part is we have true bi-directional capability between EAGLE and Fusion.
So here we're going to start off inside of Fusion. And of course, what I want to do is figure out the location of this board. So we're going to use all of our skill, we're going to draw a rectangle and use those holes and extrude it. So that is our size. And then what we're going to do here in a second, we're actually going to pass that data back to EAGLE.
As you can see, we're back inside of EAGLE, bring that back in. And now we can locate all of our components on that board.
JAY TEDESCHI: Now remember, that board is tied to the model in Fusion. So if the model updates in Fusion for, say, physical real estate requirements, EAGLE will reflect that update.
DAN BANACH: Here's the magic. So now we're going from the 2D to the 3D board. Then we'll go back to Fusion, we know that there's an update pending. Boom. How cool is that?
JAY TEDESCHI: Mixed interference.
DAN BANACH: Yeah. So now-- yep, we have a little bit of an interference. So we could have fixed the board inside of Fusion, or shown here that we can also make that change back inside of EAGLE, entirely up to you.
And so the whole electromechanical-- and we've been talking about this for a long time-- it's here.
JAY TEDESCHI: It's a great--
DAN BANACH: Cool, cool.
JAY TEDESCHI: Yeah, that's a good-looking assembly.
DAN BANACH: All right. Now we'll get to the simulation. So with Fusion, as you can see, a whole bunch of different types of simulations that we can do. We are running the Nastran engine as Jay mentioned, as well with-- the introduction with Nastran inside of Inventor with the Collection, right?
JAY TEDESCHI: Yep.
DAN BANACH: So just very quickly, again, with Fusion, we just go to our different workspaces, because it's a platform. So here we're just doing a quick analysis stress. We could do event simulation. And like I mentioned before, when we run these simulations, we can run them locally or push them up to the cloud. So we don't have to utilize our hard drive. Let that thing spin, let the cloud do it for us.
So here we're going to do an event simulation, very similar to what Jay was showing before. So we can see, that's going to move, that's going to cause a little bit of an issue, so we can fix that.
So hopefully everybody's been utilizing the simulation inside of Inventor. Very similar to what we have here inside of Fusion. So the nice part-- again, with our simulation tools, you don't have to have a PhD in simulations as well. You just go left to right, fill it out. This is very similar to what Jay was showing before with the shape generator. We have the same functionality here inside of Fusion where we can go back and start to reduce the weight.
JAY TEDESCHI: Essentially get it down to the bare minimum based on the structural requirements.
DAN BANACH: So that really tells us where we can reduce the weight?
JAY TEDESCHI: Yeah.
DAN BANACH: It's pretty cool.
So the next one, Jay, you want to walk us through what's inside of Inventor?
JAY TEDESCHI: Sure. And this is not the Nastran-- go ahead and start it. This is actually one of the built-in solvers. So this is available in just core Inventor. It's called Dynamic Simulation, and essentially it's event simulation with physics.
And so what we're going to do here, this is an assembly that it cycles every half-second and comes down. Those are basically thermal testers, and they come down and test-- this beige thing right here is actually a cup of yogurt with a foil cap.
So we found out afterwards that what this thing is actually cycling is it's coming down and then superheating it-- it makes light contact with that aluminum cover and then super heats the air underneath. And if the air-- the air expands almost immediately and pushes back on the contact with this sensor. So if it doesn't feel that pushback, then it knows that that yogurt cup is bad-- bad seal on the foil and that thing gets dropped out.
So what we're doing is defining the nature of that movement. When this piece comes down, it does it all in a half-second-- every half-second this thing cycles, and we're actually able to create a custom curve, because this thing, it accelerates quickly down to the surface and then it slows down and then it accelerates again back on its way back up, which you can see right there.
We're very quickly able to go into the output grapher and determine where we have contact, and when we have contact, we're able to pick that point and then export it to the Stress Analysis tool. So we're actually able to determine from the motion of an assembly what the stresses are going to be-- the resultant forces-- and then apply them to the components-- any of the components in that assembly to determine whether or not they are designed well enough to endure that type of loading.
DAN BANACH: So just to reiterate, so we're really finding the max stress, passing that data immediately--
JAY TEDESCHI: For a system.
DAN BANACH: Right.
JAY TEDESCHI: And then you can take all of that force data and apply that to any one of the components in that assembly.
DAN BANACH: That's pretty cool. Instead of having to do that manually.
JAY TEDESCHI: Instead of having to do it piece by piece, you do it system-wide and then just pick the parts that you're interested in analyzing.
DAN BANACH: Dynamics in. Awesome.
So documentation. So this was re-released inside of Inventor 2018. So 3D annotations, we refer to them as model-based definition. I thought this was so cool, I put it on the cover of my book.
All right. So let me walk you through this real quick. So we are inside of Inventor, we go to the Annotate tab. And of course, a lot of us have been asking for this for a long time, so of course it's based on standards, we can very quickly go back and start adding some dimensions here. The power of video.
But the nice part is, all of the dimensions that we're placing there, if I would like to, I can go back and re-utilize those when we create a drawing view. Very similar to what we do with Inventor today with the 2D dimensions. So another workflow possibility here for us.
JAY TEDESCHI: But it really unifies-- it creates a unified environment, because the model-based definition dimensions that you're adding to the part for the sole purpose of having a component that you can then send out with 3D annotation on it also ends up being the same annotation that you can utilize to essentially populate a drawing and all the drawing views. So it's dual use, if you will. It addresses a lot of problems.
DAN BANACH: All right, so hopefully this restarts. So now, we can actually take that and export a 3D PDF.
JAY TEDESCHI: 3D annotation.
DAN BANACH: So as you can see here, so now we're in Acrobat. Of course with 3D, we can rotate, spin it around. We're liking that, huh?
JAY TEDESCHI: There's also predefined views that you can snap to.
DAN BANACH: Yeah, those were at the bottom.
JAY TEDESCHI: --drawings.
DAN BANACH: So then taking it to the next level, we can also place in geometric tolerancing-- GD&T. But you'll also notice in the far left-hand side, not only are we allowing you to place in the GD&T, but we place in some checkers-- a checked analysis to make sure the data that we're placing in is valid, and if it's not, it'll get flagged on the left-hand side and we can fix that.
JAY TEDESCHI: So it's looking to make sure that, for example, you're not referencing a datum that doesn't exist or that you don't have an improper callout with regard to the tolerance that you're adding to a datum. So it's a very, very intelligent error-handling utility that's built into the Model-Based Definition tool.
DAN BANACH: So if you haven't played with that, I would take a look at it.
JAY TEDESCHI: It's very cool.
DAN BANACH: You want to walk us through this? This one's pretty quick.
JAY TEDESCHI: Continuing on with-- this area that we're working on right now we're referring to as-- just holistically the entire umbrella of documentation tools. So model-based definition assists us in creating drawings. So does the presentation environment. If you have to do tech manuals-- go ahead and hit that.
So essentially it's just the presentation environment in Inventor. You can set it up display-wise anything you want. In this regard, we went with something that looked like what you would have in a tech manual.
And then essentially what you're doing is you are disassembling an assembly with the sole purpose of showing exploded views with trails if you like. But also, at the same time, not only are you creating views for your tactical manual, this creates an animation of the reassembly of this component-- of this assembly.
And that animation can then be saved out to a video which a lot of companies these days, like IKEA, you go on their website and they're like, they don't just have that 2D manual anymore of you putting your thing together, there's actually a video very similar to this showing how parts go in, what the correct assembly order is, which fasteners need to be installed.
And the beautiful thing is that it's linked to the data years past. What you'd end up doing was taking views, two-dimensional views, and then handing them off to someone who was using FrameMaker or Illustrator and Adobe, and there was no linkage between the two. So if the design changed, they basically had to start all over again back in tech marketing-- not tech marketing, I'm sorry-- tech pubs with regard to those components that changed.
This is all tied together now. So a change to the model means you have a change to your tech pubs as well. Hit it. Go to the next one. Just the same stuff they saw.
DAN BANACH: So you want to continue with this one? This is pretty cool stuff with AutoCAD.
JAY TEDESCHI: Sure. Hit it.
DAN BANACH: Start.
JAY TEDESCHI: OK. So here, we're using-- this as another advantage to someone using the Collection is that you have access to not only AutoCAD Electrial, which we're using for the cable wire harness, but AutoCAD Mechanical, which is-- I would wager that there are very few two-dimensional drafting tools on the planet that can do what AutoCAD mechanical can do. There was HP's ME10 years ago, but that basically was the target that we were setting it at.
And one of the beautiful things about the status of AutoCAD Mechanical right now is that it is able to be used as a drafting tool-- a drawing manager, if you will-- for 3D CAD data from almost any product. The fact is, that with the inclusion of AnyCAD in Inventor and Fusion now, AutoCAD Mechanical, if you had drafters on staff and that's what they-- the product they know how to use is AutoCAD, you can document almost any 3D model on the planet, because via AnyCAD, anything can be read into Fusion or Inventor, and then detailed in AutoCAD Mechanical.
DAN BANACH: And it's linked.
JAY TEDESCHI: And it's linked. Now it's not bidirectional, but it's unidirectional, so if the model changes, it's going to update the drawing views automatically.
DAN BANACH: But if the drawing changes in AutoCAD or AutoCAD Mechanical-- let's say like we just added the view here, and I open up that DWG file inside of Inventor, you'll see those views.
JAY TEDESCHI: Yes, you will. But it's not-- you can't edit the model.
DAN BANACH: Right.
JAY TEDESCHI: Like Inventor originally-- and Solidworks and all of those bidirectional associative modelers, they allow you to create the drawing using their drawing manager, then select the dimension and actually change the model. This doesn't do that. But you're right, it is--
DAN BANACH: And so it's also-- we were talking about AutoCAD Mechanical, but you can do the same thing with just core AutoCAD.
JAY TEDESCHI: Yes you can. It's just I like Mechanical better.
DAN BANACH: It's just to clarify. All right, rendering. So this is the really cool stuff. So I'm going to take the really cool one, Jay.
JAY TEDESCHI: Go ahead.
DAN BANACH: So inside of Fusion-- yeah, so Jay did all the hard work here. So inside of Fusion we have an awesome renderer. So here, we're able to go back and just grab materials and appearances here in this case and just drag them onto the components. Then we can go back, we can set up a 3D environment. And this is a custom one that fits in--
JAY TEDESCHI: --HDR, it was downloaded from TurboSquid.
DAN BANACH: Which is pretty cool.
JAY TEDESCHI: It's actually-- it's the Formula One track in Brazil. The name escapes me right now.
DAN BANACH: And that, of course, is a 3D background is what we're talking about here. So you go back, you can add reflections, turn on your shadows. Of course, the goal here is to make it very realistic. And at the very end, I couldn't tell the difference if it was real or not.
So with the render now, we can do this locally just like the simulation, or we can decide to send it back up to the cloud. So of course, doing a high-end rendering like this, though, it will slow your computer down immensely. So this would be a good opportunity to go back and utilize the cloud.
JAY TEDESCHI: Especially if you're doing 4K renders. Those are brutal.
DAN BANACH: So here we're just changing the appearance. And then we'll send this up to the cloud and we'll see our awesome results. Did you see how I took credit for that, Jay?
JAY TEDESCHI: What's that?
DAN BANACH: Our results?
JAY TEDESCHI: Yeah.
DAN BANACH: So here we're just sending it up to the cloud. And again, we'll turn off the computer, come back-- it could be 30 minutes, an hour, come back in a week--
JAY TEDESCHI: See the lights go on? That's really-- you can do it in Fusion, you can assign illumination to-- so I actually went in and I modeled the halogen bulbs in there, and I was like, I wonder what would happen if I add illumination to these. Boom. I was like, whoa, I'm definitely putting that in the video.
DAN BANACH: Excellent job, Jay.
JAY TEDESCHI: Well, it actually-- I mean, it illuminates. You can't really tell. You can tell if you do the comparison between lights off-lights on, but it illuminated the ground. You could see it highlighting like-- do you see it right there on the corner of the bodywork? I mean, it's amazing that it's able to do that. It's just mind-boggling.
DAN BANACH: It looks a lot better on my computer than it does on the screen too, by the way.
JAY TEDESCHI: I know the guys with ZRED are like, this is old hat to them, but--
DAN BANACH: But it's now right at our fingertips. All right, so CAM-- I'll walk through this one too.
JAY TEDESCHI: Go ahead.
DAN BANACH: OK. So with Fusion and Inventor, we have HSM. How many of you have utilized any of the CAM instead of Inventor or Fusion? So the nice part is, if you learn one, very similar to the next, right?
JAY TEDESCHI: It's almost identical.
DAN BANACH: Yep. So here we're just going to start off just doing a very simple two-and-a-half axis cut. And we saw this in some previous videos before as well. So here, we can also go back and we can-- once we're done with that one, we can pattern that, which is a big time saver for sure.
Then of course, turning. And as we saw in that previous video that we looked at, this is then-- the next step, we'd go back and create the post and send that over to the machine.
So as you can see, manufacturing is extremely important to Autodesk.
All right. So we're not done yet, but I wanted to throw something in here, make sure everyone's still awake. So in your app, you can go back and tell us what's your favorite part inside of Inventor and/or Fusion. This is where we're interactive, by the way. So I'll just give you guys about 30 seconds. And we'll see some of the results, or maybe not. It's kind of like Big Brother watching, huh?
All right. Just so we don't run out of time, I'm going to move on. But even after the class, you guys can still log back in, give us some feedback and comments. So again, this was the Dan and Jay show, what we liked. Tell us if we missed something. Or if we got it 100% correct, we'd like to hear that too.
All right. So non-native data. So how many of you are getting data from other CAD systems? If you're not raising your hand, you probably will soon. It's out there. As much as we would love everybody to use Autodesk software, not always the case.
So with Fusion, what we're going to take a look at-- we have very similar tools inside in Inventor, by the way-- where we can actually work with geometry that has no features. So let's say I brought in a STEP file or an SAT file. We can go back and make some changes to this.
So very quickly here, I'm inside of Fusion, I just grab those faces, push-pull-drag. And not only can we move them out, but I can also angle it down. Very similar to what Jay was showing and what we were doing inside of Inventor with the T-splines we're able to do with Solid Model. So again, you'll see that there are no features inside of this part.
All right. So now on this section here, we just had the traditional window, I can just move that over. And then next, we're going to go back and we're going to move out that section on the left-hand side. But I don't want to just move it out, say, five millimeters. I want that overall length to be determined, so we can reset the anchor point. So now it's 50 millimeters. I know that that excursion is 50 millimeters. Is that cool or what?
Now, big ending here, right? What if I only wanted to have two pockets over there? So we can just delete that face-- gone. So if I just grabbed these two faces here, what if we just rotate them-- again, we're just setting our point of pivot. Rotate that back. So even-- I was going to say it's dumb data, but static data, no features. We have a lot of control that we can do back over them, which is really cool.
You want to take this one, Jay? Working with the same functionality, except inside of Inventor. This is some cool stuff.
JAY TEDESCHI: Yeah. We're utilizing AnyCAD, and one of the documents-- it's not really a non-native document, but it is a document that's not native to Inventor is DWG. And what we found was that a lot of our customers are still using DWG files and those are living, breathing documents.
So instead of trying to tell you that, oh, you've got to take all your data and convert it to 3D, we implemented what we call DWG underlay within AnyCAD. And what it allows us to do is leverage that DWG file with a live link to the model. So we're able to take that DWG file, bring it into our 3D model, and then use the elements of the drawing itself to create solid features.
As you'll see in a second, we're able to then-- once we have our part done, if we evaluate the assembly-- and you see those large gaps there, and we're like, OK, well that needs to be edited, we don't have to edit it on the model, I can go back-- if the drawing is controlling all of that, then we go back to the drawing and make the edit on the DWG file in AutoCAD, and then my model automatically updates based on the change to the 2D DWG file.
Furthermore, taking AnyCAD a step further, this company utilizes FANUC controllers-- FANUC uses PRIO as its modeling tool. So we're able to read in the PRIO assembly and just place it into our Inventor assembly. Now this is a link to the PRIO part, but as you saw, there was interference. And in Inventor, we're able to go in after the fact and add features to the PRIO component-- the reference of the PRIO component in Inventor.
Now the beautiful thing is that those components are linked. The reference one in Inventor and the PRIO component-- the original PRIO assembly. So when the people at FANUC go back and make a change to that assembly, because we're working on that original PRIO data, there is no work for us to go through again because it reads that data back in again, we update that component-- and as you'll see in the second, we've got that little groove in there now-- still maintaining those cuts that we went in subsequent and added.
And then finally-- you can just-- this is just showing some solid edge. I think I put a chuck on there that was from Solid Edge. And AnyCAD supports mesh data now for drawings. So you can pull in a non-BREP component that's mesh. Like scan data, pull that scan data in, pop it down, actually place it into an assembly, you can apply constraints to it, and then we can actually dimension to it as well. It's a pretty robust environment now in both products for supporting scan data. Again, that's another area where they complement each other.
DAN BANACH: All right. So you want to take this one?
JAY TEDESCHI: Go for it.
DAN BANACH: You want me to take this one? All right. So interoperability. So this, of course, is the big lead, why we are all here. And so hopefully everybody maybe learned one or two things that you didn't know was inside of Inventor or inside of Fusion.
So as we were talking about before, it's not necessarily Inventor or Fusion. We believe it's both. Think about having a whole bunch of different tools in your toolbox.
So again, we're referring to this as AnyCAD. So as you can see, we're starting off inside of Inventor.
JAY TEDESCHI: So adding some content center fasteners.
DAN BANACH: So this is the magic right here. So this is the stuff that's new. So we're going to send this up to Autodesk Drive. And this is in the 2018.2 release, by the way that's waiting for you when you get home. So now we're going to go back into Fusion. So here, we're through the web portal, so we can do a quick markup. So now we're in Fusion Team, just like we saw before inside of Fusion, but we're redlining Inventor data.
So now, just a quick change here, so now we're back inside of Fusion, and we're going to bring in that Inventor assembly. So just like Jay was showing before, bringing in the PRIO data, we're working with Inventor data inside of Fusion.
So here we can go back, do a quick analysis. Our last little vote for doing a cloud analysis. So here, again, we're in the cloud, Fusion Team. So we could redline, we're seeing what's happening in there. And of course, we saw that it needed a little bit more strength. So we sent that back to the person in Inventor, we're going to add that additional flange. And then when we go back into Fusion, there's an update that's pending. Boom.
And the nice part is that as we were talking about, right? So with the simulation, we didn't have to do anything but rerun the results. Solve it. All the loads, constraints, all of those are maintained.
So now, another question for you. So what you just learned, how likely are you to go back and utilize Fusion to Inventor, Inventor to Fusion AnyCAD functionality? We'll share the results. All right. A lot of you.
All right. So I am one minute over, I apologize for that. But we'll be around here for a little bit. If anyone has any questions, please ask. You guys were awesome. Please fill out the survey. We really appreciate getting your feedback.
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