Sharing files

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Sharing files.

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After completing this video, you'll be able to use Pack and Go to effectively share an assembly,

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export or generate files with secondary file formats, and understand the parent/child file relationships.

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Inside of Inventor, we want to begin with the supplied data set,

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Engine Mark 2.IAM, which can be found in the Assembly subfolder under Engine Mark 2.

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We want to take a look at sharing files.

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In this case, we're looking at sharing the entire engine assembly.

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When we think about an assembly inside of Inventor, it's a series of references that go back to individual part files,

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and in this case, we have a lot of individual part files.

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In some cases, for certain iterations or model states,

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we may have suppressed features, things like the engine case side and the engine sleeve side.

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Let's go ahead and navigate to File, Save As, and select Pack and Go.

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When we select Pack and Go, we have several options here.

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We can copy everything to a single path or keep the original folder hierarchy.

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We can include models only, or we can include linked files.

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We can also toggle on to skip things like library styles and templates to keep the file size of it smaller.

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And we can package everything up as a zip file.

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Once we're happy with our settings, we can select Search Now and Inventor will go through and find all the referenced files.

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If we expand this and scroll down through, we can see if we've got the engine case with the side option.

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And note here that we don't have any engine case shown with the side option because they're currently suppressed.

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All of the other components that are simply hidden from view by changing their visibility options based on our view states,

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those are all still available inside of our Pack and Go.

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Once we're done, we can select Start and this will create a Pack and Go.

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If you already have an existing Pack and Go zip file,

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it's important that you change the name or location where you're saving or allow it to overwrite.

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I'm going to go ahead and overwrite the existing and say Yes.

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It's important that we keep in mind the parent/child relationship between assembly components.

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Oftentimes those relationships come based on the way in which components were added to the assembly.

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We can see that there are mates involved in the engine piston and those are generally shown in the relationships folder.

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There are other relationships that we do have to consider when we're talking about Inventor designs.

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Let's go ahead and open the piston.

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When we open the piston and we select a feature, for example Extrusion 3 and right click, we have relationships at the part level.

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These relationships are also parent/child relationships,

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but they depend on things like when sketches were created and what features were used based on the sketches or projected geometry.

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For any of these features, we can click the icon on the right hand side, which will automatically go into editing that feature or sketch.

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Once we finish, we'll be able to go back and work on the design.

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Now that we have a little bit of an idea of how parent/child relationships work at the part and the assembly level,

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let's also talk about other formats.

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If we need to send this part out to be 3D printed, we could use the File option, select Export and pick an intermediate CAD format.

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When we select intermediate CAD formats, we can send it out as an OBJ or an STL file or even a step file if the 3D print slicer can support that.

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If we're thinking about sending the entire engine assembly

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in a way that's not a Pack and Go that doesn't contain all the history on how it was created,

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we can also use the file export option and determine another valid file format.

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Whether it's an intermediate CAD format that doesn't have history on how the part was created,

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or using something like a three DPDF that allows the end recipient to rotate the model and even perform some basic measurements.

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We can even use things like the DWF viewers.

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In most cases, we would want to make sure we understand what data is being sent when we create these external file formats.

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At this point, no save is needed so we can closeout any of our designs and move on.