Create a factory design utilities layout

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Now let's have a look at layouts.

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A factory layout is basically the container of all your factory related spatial representation.

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They allow you to place assets but also references of the building context.

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For example, you can use one or more existing DWGs in form of an underlay as a reference for positioning.

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Larger layouts or if multiple users need to work on the same layout and parallel for instance,

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can be broken up into so called sub-layouts.

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Inventor's any CAD functionality can be used to reference building context coming

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for example in the form of a Revit project file,

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the layout with all their content is also the file

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that you would synchronize by directionally between the involved tools.

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Let's see how that looks in action.

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Here we are looking at the master layout of a digital factory model created via factory design utilities.

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It consists of different production lines and office space as well as some reference DWG underlays.

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We would merely like to modify the setup of one of the production lines,

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so we opened its sub-layout in order to do so.

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the first changes we would like to apply in birds eye view for convenience,

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so we trigger the synchronization to AutoCAD via the dedicated command in the ribbon panel.

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The layout gets opened automatically with an AutoCAD

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and updated appropriately reflect the same state as we saw inside of inventor.

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Now, we can begin with our modifications.

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We would like to add a conveyor system from one machine through the whole production area.

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Let's say the customer requested this to reduce time spent by factory workers to move the product to packaging.

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We therefore access our asset library on the right hand panel and brought for the correct conveyor.

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In this case we also leverage some built in automation in form of our configured as chain asset.

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As we drop polyline representing the middle of the route Our conveyor should run along

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and trigger its conversion to an asset chain via the ribbon command.

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Instances of the asset are placed fully automatically connected to each other

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and visually represented within the layout.

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After confirming that the positioning and dimensions are correct.

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After population, we can then synchronize it back to inventor in order to review our updates in 3D space.

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The 3D geometric representation is fetched from the factory assets file and populated within the 3D context as well.

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Within Inventor.

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First the 2D representation is updated and then the layer is populated with the associated 3D models.

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You can see the different instances of the conveyors also being added in the model browser.

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To keep things organized,

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we assign them to the correct layer and simply move them to the dedicated folder that we created prior

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or have setup within the layout template.

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Now we unfortunately forgot to also add the receiving packing machine when we were in AutoCAD,

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but not to worry as mentioned the same drag and drop mechanism to place assets is available inside inventor.

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Again we browse to the library and start the placement by double clicking on the desired piece of equipment.

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Note that as we move the preview of your assets to review,

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the connectors that are available to connect to start reacting to each other,

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making it easy to correctly align our packing machine.

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Once placed,

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we can exit out of the placement mode via right click done and tidy up the model browser again.

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To close the loop with the rest of the team,

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we save the changes and will get a notification within our Master layout

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that there have been some updates to one of the sub-layouts.

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Upon refreshing, we will see all the updates also reflected in the full digital factory

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and we are ready for checking it in the modified files into our data management system

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for other colleagues to be able to consume them.