Designs Unleashed: Mastering Inventor Modeling for Informed Design

DANNY LEWIS: All right and welcome. This is going to be the "Designs Unleashed Mastering Inventor Modeling for Informed Design," presented at AU 2024. So before I begin, just in case, I'm going to give this whole safe harbor statement that Autodesk likes to give us, I tend to sit in a lot of forums and talk to a lot of Autodesk people, and I honestly can't remember what I've heard from them or what I've just thought about my own. So don't take anything that I'm saying here as any more than just my opinion who doesn't work at Autodesk.

So these are going to be the agenda or the objectives that we have to do. And the way we're going to learn them today is through first learning why we should care about parametric models. And then what does informed design mean for the Autodesk tools? And then we'll do a little bit of the parametric modeling, just kind of beginner level to intermediate level. And then we're going to be learning how to do publishing into informed design and then a little bit more advanced level modeling.

And then finally, we're going to do some of the best practices that I'm recommending for this. So a little bit about me.

I'm a mechanical engineer. I grew up within the product design and manufacturing world where I first designed a bunch of industrial mobile equipment for underground mining. I then moved over to consulting, where I eventually got tasked to help out with a bunch of AC type work using a variety of Autodesk and third-party software. And now, I serve as the primary subject matter expert for Hatch for all things Autodesk and Autodesk related.

So some other classes that I recommend people go check out that might provide a bit more context to what we're talking about today. I presented with a colleague in 2021 on the Tulip Bridge. We did a good job there. We were rated that the top engineering class to be able to attend that and then did another class in New Orleans where it was the Advanced Inventor Modeling for InfraWorks and just really digging deep on how you publish to that workflow.

A little bit about Hatch. We're a global company with employees all over the world and execute a wide variety of projects all over the world. We're Canadian-based and employee owned and have been around for quite a while.

Hatch does quite a wide variety of things and works in more sectors than just AEC. So the main three categories would be metals, energy, and infrastructure. And then within each one of those, we've got them broken down to a lot of subcategories, such as tunnels, bridges, nuclear power, Hydrow battery, metals, airports, et cetera, everything in between. So first, we're going to go a little bit about parametric models.

So a brilliant person once said, if you're not creating parametric models, you're doing it wrong. And of course, that person was me whenever I'm talking to pretty much anyone within Hatch or any of the various projects that we're on.

So first off, what are the benefits of parametric models? Well, they're faster to do modifications. There's better reusability of the models. The models are more consistent, and there's typically more m rich information into them.

And it lends themselves open to doing more automated and connective capabilities within the models. And I always like to say a good parametric model means that it's one, and then it's done.

So what is the impact of this informed design, or what do I think it's going to be? Well, before we had informed design, each parametric model was useful within the software is created, which was good if the software had the capabilities to do those parametric models. But if it didn't, then you didn't have any other options. Different software would have different levels of how much they support this parametric models.

And they could technically do it, but maybe be a lot of effort to be able to do that. And then some of the workflows required a lot of requesting a new model. And there's a lot of back and forth between those groups. And that's just very time consuming, if you can avoid that in all cases.

So now that we have informed design, Inventor can be the tool of which we do all this parametric modeling, and for those unfamiliar with Inventor, just think it's as awesome as Revit, but better. And with it, you can directly change the parameters of the model or the Inventor model within Revit. And this changes from how you would interact with it before because now you just stay within Revit.

And then within this capability, you can also export a lot of the drawings and files, and any other kind of supporting stuff that you want. So you don't, again have to go back to Revit or the Revit user to get that information. It's all kind of baked into whatever you're looking at through this InfraWorks or informed design.

So I have to say, though, InfraWorks did this kind of four or five years ago. They work a little bit differently under the hood, but both provide the functionality of publishing an Inventor model to the software and then flexing the parameters within the other InfraWorks software. The major benefit of InfraWorks is that it can tie some of the Inventor model parameters to Civil 3D alignment data. And again, this is better covered in the previous [? eight ?] classes, so I won't go into much of the detail.

The InfraWorks models do translate over to Revit, much like informed design, and has the ability to map the models to Revit categories and the like. But admittedly, editing between them requires an exporting and refreshing step. So if all you care about, which is Revit, which is like 95% of the [? CAD ?] users, and the workflow can seem a little bit disconnected for this.

That all being said, InfraWorks is awesome, and I highly recommend everybody go check it out-- previous AU classes and just check with the software. It's a very powerful tool. Definitely worth taking a look. Here I've got just a small sample of some of the things we've done within Hatch to test and flex what the capabilities are with the tool.

Data exchanges are another one where they're doing a similar thing, but they're doing it just a little bit differently. So the way they do it is it'll publish it into a neutral file and a data format. And then it just deals with the neutral file and data format. So it's powerful in that it's pretty agnostic for where it's coming from, but it has its limitations to it.

So it requires external parties to update the models for you. And the good thing is that they're agnostic. So you can go through and have different versions and different stuff like that. But again, it's always an exchange.

So for an internal company like us, it's kind of good because even though you're kind of exchanging, you're going through so many different software, it does provide a benefit, different cases for it.

So another one that's good is Inventor and Revit interoperability. So Inventor and Revit have gained a lot of improvements over the years, which is good. And they've also now got the ability that you can import and export the Revit files directly into each other. So you can turn that into very powerful workflow where I'm pulling in the Revit file, referencing it, building Inventor models, exporting those Revit models back into Revit, and then simplifying them first.

And I kind of see them all around, round tripping like that. They did kind of release-- the team Inventor did release the IFC file capabilities to import that, and it's better. So we'll likely go with that more in the future. But it's another kind of tool that has been added into this realm that's similar to what Informed Design is doing.

So for a while now, inventors have had to publish Inventor to RFAs, and that's been good. And you can add in the Revit recognized features within Inventor, such as piping connections and cable trays. And essentially, you can use Inventor to make the Revit components that are too difficult to build in Revit with the tools that they have in there because the Inventor [INAUDIBLE].

And Form Design is essentially doing the same thing. I did a bit of testing where I publish both out of the environments to see how they interact within Revit, and both of the connectors kind of adapt with models and have the same capabilities. So that's what's happening under the hood is it's using that publishing tools, that capability that Inventor already has, and just providing a little bit of a better workflow to it, we'll say.

That being said, Informed Design models are better than Revit families-- hot take there. They're obviously a simple example is that Revit, families are essentially static snapshots of a single object, whereas in Form Design model is an empty vessel for inputting a wide range of parameters and some within predefined boundaries. And then you can not only have just the model output, which is great, but a whole collection of other outputs and variants of that object available to you. Instances in this regard would be different views and orientations of the object but within the same parameters. So something like a door being open or closed, but the dimensions of the door remaining the same.

So who is Informed Design for? Obviously, prefab component fabricators. This is obviously where they're tailored for, where the supplier of the prefab components just make an Informed Design model, then have it to the joint venture, and then let them place and tweak components as necessary without having to test them for every single change. Another one would be anyone who wants to have more detailed families being published without having to do them natively out of Revit functionality.

And again, this is a good example would be pump manufacturers. To try and build the pump families within Revit tools is difficult, whereas Inventor makes pretty short work of it. And then, of course, consulting firms like Hatch where a bit of a one and number two where we're doing a mix of things where we have some more detailed things that we'll be engineering and then we'll be incorporating that into the rest of the project. And otherwise, we're working at the number two. But reality is eventually I think everyone's going to be using Informed Design because of again, the potential that it provides to this.

So if I look at what Inforrmed Design is, admittedly, it's kind of a lackluster tool for Revit because Revit already has these capabilities to do parametric modeling within it, and Informed Design is doing it better, but not really adding anything that you couldn't technically do if you weren't an advanced Revit user. But once you start to apply it to all the other Autodesk software that maybe don't have those capabilities, then it really, really starts to look in an appealing kind of software and tool and you see where this is going in that direction.

So first, we're going to take our baby steps into it. But before we do that, we kind of need to learn how to do parametric modeling in the first place.

So within Inventor, all the Inventor parts and assemblies have parameters. And I would actually challenge someone to try and make a model in Inventor without having created the parameters, because I don't think it can be done. And Inventor has a pile of other capabilities to link parameters to other data sources, such as Excel files. So it's very capable.

Inventor parameters are things used to describe and interact with your specific model, such as dimensions and angles, whereas the parameter or properties are values to describe your model itself. Like who's the Inventor? Who's your manufacturer?

Parameters are broken into three main groups. So we got model parameters, which are created automatically as you define your model in the first place. Reference are created if you add any redundant stitches or dimensions to your sketches, we'll say. And then custom or user parameters, whatever you want to call them, these are the ones that you can just dump whatever you want to as a parameter in there.

So to go over what those look like in Inventor, you'll have your parameters view, and what you'll see is your model parameters. And then I'm going to add any kind of custom parameters in here, and you get three types-- numeric, text, and then Boolean. Within each parameter, you can define all the units, and world's your oyster. Or you can just always define it as UL and then just carry it without units and then maybe put what the units are in the comments for yourself.

And then for any of these parameters as well, you can turn them into a multi-value dropdown list. And this is very potent in that you can turn this into restricted sizes or have a specific parameter that when that parameter goes to that valu, you know what's going to be coming. And then you can program around it to set a bunch of other values to match it.

So within your actual user parameters, go over what is actually being shown here. So first off, consumed by is what the sketch parameter is used on. So it kind of tells you where it's being used in your model.

Then I've got my numerical values for that. And that could be formulas as well. So I can say 42 plus 36 plus 5 or whatever. I'm then going to see what is the value that is nominal to what I've calculated there and then what kind of tolerance.

You want to apply to that. Is that plus or minus 5 or something? And then finally, what is the actual value being displayed in the model after your tolerancing? To be honest, we don't really use a tolerancing a lot. And for Informed Design, that's probably getting too much into the weeds.

And then lastly, you can kind of dictate whether it's a key parameter. And this is more of is this a parameter that you really need to keep track of? Because this is what defines the model. There might be some other parameters that are useful, but they're not user facing that they need to be able to adjust it.

And then actual lastly is this export parameter. And again, hadn't used it very much myself in the past, but this actually dictates what will be exposed to Revit properties. So very important if you're going to be doing any kind of thing that's facing to Revit in the end.

When you actually put something as an export to Revit, what it does is it takes those values and then turns them into properties. So here's the ones I have on the left, and then it just created all these properties.

But you'll note that the numerical parameters are just described as text. So whatever units I have in there, it's going to dump them in space. Here's your unit. And so you kind of have to parse it back into an actual true value of unit and then keep track of what your units are when you're doing this.

And it will be taking the nominal value. So even though I've got a formula in there, it's going to be taking that nominal value, not even, I think, the model value-- might be the model value. Don't quote me on that-- might be wrong.

Another good thing to keep in mind when you're doing this parametric modeling for them is that the default for Inventor is to have the y in the upwards direction, and this is because of it grew out of a 2D drafting environment where you'd have x and y on your page. And Z would be in and out of the page. The rest of the world, however, including Revit, has z as the vertical direction because I'm looking at a map now.

And so my recommendation is to just make your life easier and create your models with z in the upwards direction in Inventor, and then things just show up correctly in Revit. So there's the first tip is set your orientations correctly.

Once you've got your model kind of started and ready, one thing I commend is you can go into the tools, documents, units setting, and then display as expression for all of your values. And what that's going to do is it's going to display the whole expression of what you're actually describing on each of your dimensions. Because in each of the things you assign, it's always going to be assigning a parameter to whether you want to or not.

So here's all your model parameters just for your sketch. And then here's all the parameters that are defining the extrusion of this. And there are six model parameters just to define a single [INAUDIBLE] process. So you're going to have parameters absolutely everywhere, and you kind of want to know what's going where.

So once you've got the model with your model parameters and maybe want to assign them to some custom parameters, if you go and double-click one of the dimensions themselves on the sketch, you'll get this box where you can list the parameters. And then within there, you can drop it down, and then it'll list out all the appropriate custom parameters that you could then tie that parameter to. So once you've done that, you can map all your model parameters to user parameters, and then you can do a lot of fancy things with it.

One of the fancy things is I'd requested to Team Inventor nicely to add this paste with formulas. So let's say I have a sketch where I've got all these model parameters tied to a bunch of user parameters, and then I copy and paste that sketch. Now it'll paste that sketch with the formulas that also then pass back to those user parameters, because then I can go and adjust a single parameter and have multiple parameters all update and multiple sketches all update, which is a very powerful tool when you start to look at doing these kind of parametric modeling.

So going a little bit deeper into the parametric modeling, you can set limits on the parameters, and this is getting a little bit more advanced. But you'd add a little bit of py logic to your code. So within each of the part files, you can embed some logic code, and this can be as simple as I have a couple parameters.

And if one parameter gets big, I want to make the other one smaller or whatever I want. And any parameters that I have, I can just pull them into the code by like clicking my user parameter area and then double-clicking that parameter and then just references it into your code. So it's very simple. You don't have to know how to do a lot of programming to be able to create the very simple kind of logic codes.

And then those codes will trigger anytime that parameter changes. This is a simple way to act it as a limiter, where if this parameter becomes five and I say, no, make it four, it'll go in, and it'll change it for me. I have suggested that this could be better.

I think it's in one of the forums. You can go and suggest it. But again, one of the things I'd like to see would be Inventor tailoring itself more to this parametric modeling, such as building the limits into the parameters in the beginning.

So the other thing you can do is you can control the features. So any feature, you can create, you can control whether it's active or not. And this can drastically change the model just in itself by turning a few things on and off. And you can turn the features off or you can connect it to a parameter. Or you can just use your logic codes to turn the features off.

Again, as I mentioned before, a pro tip I have for this is to rename your features, make your life easier. And instead of looking for extrusion 47 and trying to figure out what that is, just name it something logical for yourself.

And it's also important to note that the features are calculated always from top to bottom. So the sequencing of those features in the adventure tree actually matters, and it will calculate them in order. So if you suppress something at the top and reference it later on, you're going to get error messages.

So first way to suppress the feature by parameter values, you can connect it pretty easily to a parameter. You would just go into that feature in itself, click into the properties area, and then you'll be highlighted where you see this simple kind of logic you can put to it to say, if this parameter value is greater than or less than 0, then it's suppressed. And so suppressed means it's turned off. Or you can just go and manually turn off that feature if that's something you want to have just suppressed, and you don't want to have it anymore in what you're doing at this time.

And another kind of pro tip here is that if you have a lot of features, sometimes it's easier in the code or just in logic to move the end of part up to purge off some of the bottom features you might have instead of just suppressing them all. Another way mentioned you can suppress them by using py logic. So within this, the easiest way is to go and right-click the actual feature. And then there's a thing that says capture state.

When you capture the state, it's going to take the name of the feature and whether it's active and all the other kind of values to it. And then you can just parse that down because you don't need everything. You just need to say, hey, if this feature is, if this parameter is this value, then the feature is on. Otherwise, the feature is off. And this is kind of backwards because is active true means it's there, is active false means it's suppressed.

And again, rename it before you do the code because otherwise you're going to capture the state of a feature, and then you're going to rename it. And then the code is going to be broken, and you're going to have to go and fix it again.

So using properties and custom properties, same kind of thing rather than using your parameters and everything, you can pull in properties and then tie those properties to some of your logic code. Or you can embed the logic properties within your model files. I would recommend doing this by logic. You can do it manually, but I mean, if you have a lot of values and you want them to change as your model is kind of adapting, maybe it's size A and size B And you want to put that into somewhere in the code with to label it as such, then you would have to do it through logic.

I have some helpful codes that I would paste, or they will be available in the handout section. And what these do is just kind of clearly make it easy to insert the properties into the custom properties or into the Inventor standard properties function, because that's a little bit convoluted if you're not used to that.

Another note for suppressions is the features are sequential. So if you suppress a feature at the top and the feature below depends on it, that feature is also going to be suppressed whether you like it or not. So just be aware of as you're building out these features, if they're related and you're suppressing things that they're relating to, you might be causing a bit of headache for yourself down the road. So now we're going to move into publishing to the Informed Design group.

So once you have your majestic model, what's next? Step one is, of course, install the add-ons.

And there's an add-in for the Inventor one and an add-in for the Revit. Inventor does the exporting to informed Design, and Revit obviously does the importing one. Once you have that installed, you'll get this nice, beautiful-looking majestic icon. And that will be a new tab in your toolbox or toolbar.

If you don't see it, you can check within your tools area for the add-ons, and then you should be able to see Informed Design being automatically reloaded. And if you don't see it in there, something's going to go right. Or it might be there, but it's not being loaded. So you can load them automatically. So something to check to see if it's not showing up correctly.

The next thing I would recommend is to set up a project file for your Informed Design model. The Informed Design [INAUDIBLE] it's looking for all the support files for what you might have in there. So if you point it to a vault project, it's going to start searching through everything you have in your vault working folder, which could be thousands upon thousands of files. So create your own little single user project dedicated for the Informed Design, and it'll make life easier. I have asked whether Autodesk plans to fix it. I think the answer is no. It's kind of by design that they want to have it combing and grabbing everything that's related to it, and it doesn't really work with vault now.

So the other setup is to make sure your model works correctly and has all the parameters you want before you publish it-- seems obvious, but make some changes in your parameters. Flex it a little bit to make sure it's happy. Make sure it's got all the custom properties you want and make sure it's got the right units. I have found that changing the unit type after publishing it can cause problems. And again, I think that might be related to how it's relating those units through the properties, which are just the text value. And then it's going to try and interpret them again down the road.

So number 4 would be-- click the Product Definition tab [INAUDIBLE]. And then you're likely going to be asked to update it because, as I mentioned, it's a very new tool, and there's still very much work in progress on it. I think it updated about two or three times during the course of writing this presentation, actually. But once that's all done, then you get to enter the brand-new world of this Informed Design tool. And we'll take a look at that.

So first thing you'll do in there is that you'll define what your model is and what files it needs. So this is, again, where that unique project file comes in handy because you're going to know where the files are. They're in the same folder. And then the next tab you have from there is where you define what your values are. But, as it shows here, it's only showing parameters. And what happened to our other model properties? And, oh, now I just remember I want to put Revit connectors in too. So you can go back-- even though you started to publish it, you can go back into [INAUDIBLE] still change things.

So in this, let's say you want to add some BIM content to Revit connectors. So you can go and add them now. And you would go into the Environments tab, BIM Content. And you'd see all your connectors there. As I was writing this, I then noticed, hmm, what is that other field that says BIM Definitions on the side? And I was a bit curious about that. And then I realized everything here is wrong. And again, Informed Design is changing rapidly.

So one of the updates that came in on August 12 was to bring in this new BIM Definition tab. And what that does is it provides this new area of where you're supposed to provide all these definitions to it, including the connectors and all that stuff. And again, I had this slide where it's saying, well, this is, how you author your building components. And you bring them in, and this is the properties you're going to bring in.

And Informed Design mentioned this is how we're supposed to bring properties in. But then this is all wrong. And the correct way is, again, through that BIM Definition tab that came in with the updates, and the properties have to be coming in through here. Otherwise, they won't get recognized through Informed Design-- so just the way it is. So yeah, thanks to them times 2 for fixing that. But that's all we're going to do for Informed Design today. There is literally way too much content and way too much changing that, even if I did discuss about it, it would go stale very quickly.

So the rest of this presentation is about, again, making those models that would take advantage of this fancy new Informed Design features. Because, again, it's good now, but it's going to be so much better once they have it connected to everything else. And again, there's lots of information on there. And if you do want me to have [? it ?] cover more, you can always vote up the class so I can teach more on this topic and go more into this, how you publish it, and what kind of nuanced things you can do within Informed Design.

But back to the Inventor side, let's learn a little bit more about Multi-Body Modeling. So Inventor also has the capabilities to create parts that contain multiple bodies within them. And within that, the features can be set to interact with all the bodies or a few of the bodies or each feature. And the bodies retain some level of property data that can be referenced to iLogic to create even more data. So even though I have one part, I can have multiple subparts within it, we'll say.

And then those Multi-Body parts can get split into an assembly of parts from the original Multi-Body. So it gets really confusing, but it's to say it's really powerful as a tool. And again, the pro tip there is, rename your various bodies so that it's not all solid 1, solid 1 or 2, 3.

So the way to create that is, the very first time that you do any kind of extrusion, it's just going to say, OK, I'm going to make a body. And this body is called solid 1. Great. The next time I do an extrusion, I get this option on the bottom here, where I can either join to the body or I can create a new solid. And that new solid-- again, the default's going to be solid 2. But now I've created a new solid in the same model.

And Inventor treats each solid as its own entity with its own physical properties, parents, and names. And then each solid can consist of multiple features to generate that solid. So the features can get shared among multiple solids. And it can get really confusing soon. But here's an example where I have one feature that's maybe cutting through two or three of those solids there but not interacting with the third one. So you can have a feature that selectively interacts with the solids, which is a very powerful tool once you start getting into it. Yeah, doesn't affect [INAUDIBLE] 3.

So solids can interact with each other and create the new shapes that you couldn't achieve through other means, really. So the other tool within here is this Combine tool, where I've got two solids and I'm going to combine them into a single one. Or, within it, I can move bodies, which is, again, powerful. It has its applications, where I want to move a body and it allows me to kind of move 100 features in one. And then I can cut it and merge it and do all that stuff. So very, very fancy stuff to do with it-- you can rotate. You can move. You can do a lot of different things. And your original sketch is kind of staying in the same place.

The other thing with Multi-Bodies is, whatever is visible is what exports out from the model. So this means you can selectively remove parts just by managing the View Representations instead of even doing a cut. So just adjusting the visibility of the solid or including a solid is as good as turning it on and off, in this regards. So here's three options. They all look radically different, but all I'm doing is literally just turning on and off solids.

So lastly, I'm going to get into the safe modeling practices that I'd [? go ?] here. So again, first off, I'm not going to be going into depth on Inventor because it is a giant, giant software. So this is just intended to cover some of the pitfalls that you're going to get when you're doing parametric modeling. Inventor is a huge program but has a huge collection of support articles and AU classes on how to do many, many, many things. So even going back to the Multi-Body solids, there's tons of things you can refer back to on AU classes that will explain that in much more detail than I went into just there.

So tip number 1, Inventor is not AutoCAD. Do not stuff everything into one sketch. The way Inventor kind of thinks of it is, it's going to be trying to calculate all the little lines and dots and features relative to each other and to see if they're breaking any rules that I've constrained upon this thing. That can get very computational. And if you do a lot of things in one sketch, it can just turn into one big error message, and it breaks when you're not expecting it to.

So the correct way to do this is actually build a lot of simple sketches that kind of build and cascade upon each other. So I have a rectangle on the top-right corner, and then I have a couple small features. And then I have a couple more features that reference those features and build upon it and expand it. So you should have a cascading level of sketches instead of one big, super-duper sketch.

Related to that is-- don't bring in any more reference geometry than you need to. So between sketches, I can reference the geometry that is already available in the model. But be more selective about that because everything that you're bringing in is a liability. And if that feature doesn't exist or it gets moved or changes its geometry significantly, it's going to give an error message to what I've referenced in. And [? if ?] I don't care that I've referenced it in and it's now going to create error messages, I've just created a headache for myself. So if I don't need to reference it, don't. Just selectively pick what you're going to reference in as you're building out your sketches and stuff.

The next is to reference Simple Features instead of the complex bodies. This one's hard to avoid sometimes. But if I'm referencing, like, a lofted edge, it's going to change from a fancy line to a spline to a paraboloid or something like that. And as it transitions between those very complex shapes, it's very likely going to break. So it's kind of a cascading thing of, if I can reference a dot, that's pretty bulletproof. That's always going to be there. Next up would be a plane or an axes or a line.

Or if I use some of the surface tools, sometimes those are a little bit easier to reference-- so in this example, doing a line at the end of the axes. And then just take that out as a surface. And then referencing that surface ended up being the only thing I could reference that wouldn't break in this scenario.

Again, the same thing-- keep your iLogic simple. I like to say that somebody else should be able to pick up your model and understand what's going on. And it's probably going to be you after, like, a month. So keep your iLogic short, to the point, multiple iLogics if you need to. It's not as efficient to have it in multiple different iLogics, but it's way easier to diagnose, so that's better.

Number 5 would be don't be a hero. And we're not Victoria's Secret, so no super models here. Don't try and have it do too much. People typically run into the scenario where they just want to have this flick all the bells and whistles off. But as they're doing that, they're just making their model way and way more complicated and adding more parameters to describe things that might not even exist in certain scenarios of the model.

So I would recommend, keep your model to the point. It has some flexibility to it. But once it starts to go off on a different track, it should be a separate model, within regards-- or within reason, we'll say. All the fancy tools within Inventor won't work for Informed Design. I have the whole-- speculate they won't work. I confirm they don't work.

A lot of these have dependencies on assemblies, and those dependencies will then look for a content library that just won't exist. So think of it as emailing this to a colleague around the world. What's the likelihood of all those fancy tools and all those dependencies not getting broken? It's pretty low. So unfortunately, all the tools like Frame Generator, Gear Generator, Bolted Connections-- all that stuff-- [? just ?] won't work.

Another good one is hide things versus suppressing them-- as I alluded to this. When you suppress something, it just doesn't exist. Whereas if you hide it, it still exists, I just can't see it. And then in terms of publishing it to Revit, you're still not going to see it. So it's effectively disappearing the model. But from on your Inventor side, I still get all the references to it. So I can still pull geometry from it. I can reference that geometry downstream. And I'm less likely to have my models catastrophically break and do weird things when I'm not expecting them to.

Lastly-- or not, lastly, number 8-- use Multi-Body solids versus assemblies. Again, this is a bit of a bias, I'd say, on my part. Where assemblies are a lot more things to keep track of-- you have multiple files to deal with. You have assembly constraints-- whereas a Multi-Body, you can just have one sketch and create 12 different parts on it-- or parts. I should say bodies. And the reality is that right now, Informed Design doesn't recognize any kind of assemblies, so you're not going to gain anything with it right now.

And even if you did, there's better modeling techniques to just do Multi-Body and then split it back into an assembly and use the sketch to define the location of things as opposed to using the assembly features to do that. Now, there is a case where you need to do assemblies sometimes-- again, not for this course, because it's a little bit advanced to get into those things.

Tip number 9 would be to avoid Adaptive Components. Again, Adaptive Components only really come in if you're doing assembly modeling. So that's how you avoid doing them, is just don't do assembly modeling. What they're doing is, effectively, they're going to take a part file. And then they're going to stretch it to what it needs to be to match the parameters of this new scenario.

Well, if I'm defining this parametrically, I already know what everything is going to be. And I can just set it to the right dimensions and extrude it to a plane, and then the plane moves up and down. So I already know that. So there isn't really a case to do the Adaptive Components. And it reduces a lot of complexity and calculations that the model has to do in the background. So again, I just avoid them. Maybe they're fine, but personally, I avoid them.

And then just the rule of thumb-- the more complicated you have it, the more breakable it is. So how you're doing it is more important than the actual complexity of the model. It's more of-- don't make 1,000 sketches, and don't make 100 features. Try and keep it clean, concise, something you can come back to after a month and still know what the heck's happening. And again, you should be able to hand it off to a colleague and they're not confused by all this convoluted mess you've made.

Sometimes it is hard to not make it complicated. But sometimes that means it's different parts or just thinking about a different way-- or, again, reaching out to the forums and stuff.

So tip omega is self-help documents. There is a good wealth of knowledge from the Informed Design team on how to do this better. So they go really into depth about the practices of iLogic, including how to reference to Excel files properly-- I didn't really get into that in here-- and how to use their fancy code blocks, which, if you don't know how to use iLogic, that's probably a lower bar to entry to try and figure out the logic steps within there.

And then there's also just the Inventor help information so how to do Multi-Body parts and how to do skeletal modeling. It's just within the help file. And the Inventor team is really, really good at documenting how to do things. So, again, to iterate, there's so much help available on how to actually build these models within these constraints that I've mentioned. Inventor Forum is a great one.

Usually there's a response within, like, two hours from somebody who's saying this is how you solve your problem. Or, hey, this has been solved and go check it out here. Another good resource, obviously, is YouTube. So here's some good channels that I'd recommend. Obviously, the Autodesk Inventor channel is a good one. Tech 3D and Synergis-- very good guide to do more advanced things and geometry things within Inventor.

And then lastly, it sounds dumb, but just hovering over a button and pressing F1 takes you to their help menu and explains in excruciating detail how to do almost everything that seems mundane, like how to drill a hole into a part. They've got you covered. And they've got, like, an essay written, how to use that button. So it's very easy to follow and, again, highly recommend to be doing this with Informed Design and making some awesome models out there.