Utilize view and inspect tabs in parts and assemblies

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Utilize View and inspect tabs and parts and assemblies.

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After completing this video, you'll be able to activate and modify section views, save a view representation,

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activate and control surface analysis, demonstrate knowledge on the tools within the View tab,

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and obtain interference between components.

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Inside of Inventor, we want to begin with the supplied assembly Blower.IAM.

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This could be found in the Assembly subfolder under the Blower subfolder.

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We're going to be talking about the View and Inspect tabs inside of Inventor.

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It’s important to note that these tools do differ from parts to assemblies,

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so we're going to be taking a look at parts and assemblies in this video.

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First, we want to go to the top of our assembly and make sure that we expand our representations.

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Notice that in our view representations, we have a primary and a default view.

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The primary view has a bunch of things currently visible like planes and reference sketches,

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while the default has all of those things hidden.

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Using view representations for things like

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different components and appearances is great, but we can also use it for things like section views.

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So in order for us to create a section view,

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let's first take a look at our Inspect tab and note that we have Analyze Interference and Activate Contact Solver here.

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As we move over to our View tab, we've got options for creating section views.

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The first thing that we want to do is create a new view representation.

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I’m going to go to our view default, right click and create new.

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I’m going to call this Section and hit Enter.

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Then we're going to create a half section view.

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To do this, we need to select a plane.

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We can expand our origin folder and we can find a plane that we want to use,

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in this case the YZ plane.

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Then we want to pull this forward until it's at the correct location.

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I want to see at least part of the fan blade and the opening for the blower.

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Once it's in a good location at about 11 inches, we'll say, OK.

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Now if we go back to our default view, notice that the section view is hidden.

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We can activate a section view on any view representation,

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but keep in mind that in order for it to be visible, we need to make sure that it's saved in a view representation.

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With the section view active, let's navigate to our Inspect tab and use Analyze Interference.

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We want to make sure that there's no interference between the blower housing and the blade itself.

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We'll select those components and say OK.

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It's going to analyze interference and it'll tell us either there is an interference or there's not.

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It tells us that there is an error that has occurred,

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and if we expand this, it says that it did not produce meaningful intersection from the edges.

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So this tells me that there's no intersection between these two components.

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There are some instances where we might want to use analyze interference for things like hardware and holes in our components.

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You can see here that we've got a small amount of interference detected .017 * 10 to the three.

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This is OK.

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This likely means that we've got a tight fit on one part of the hardware, but these things should be analyzed in our assembly.

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Let's go ahead and navigate back to the default view.

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Next, we want to go back to our View tab and we want to take a look at some of the other options that we have.

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We want to do this at the part level, however,

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so let's find a component, in this case this weldment.

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We'll right click and select open,

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double click the mouse wheel so we can view it in the screen, and now we're going to navigate to our View tab.

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Note that in this instance, we're dealing with a weldment assembly.

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When we're dealing with assemblies, the view options are going to be the same whether it's a weldment assembly

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or if it's a default type of assembly.

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So anything that we see on the Inspect and View tabs will be the same in both environments.

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If instead, however, we select one of these components, the exhaust,

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and we open it individually

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and we take a look at our inspect tools, notice that we don't have our interference detection because this is not an assembly of components.

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We now have access to things like zebra stripes, draft analysis, and surface analysis.

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If we go to our view tab, it looks likely the same and notice that most of the options are similar or if not the same between parts and assemblies.

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Let's go back to inspect and let's take a look at our surface analysis.

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When we select a component with our surface analysis, we have a couple of options.

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We can use the Gaussian method, the mean curvature, or the max curvature.

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When we're looking at a surface analysis, what we're actually seeing here is a radius of curvature with a color bar applied to our model.

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For example, as we look at this model on the outside,

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we can see that the entire outside section is yellow, telling me that this is a consistent radius.

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We can see that the entire inside section is green, which is telling me that it's a consistent radius.

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But because it's at a different position on our color bar, it's a different radius value.

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If we rotate the model around, there'll likely be other areas where we can see different radius values curves.

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You can see here that we've got a purple section, and in the red sections we likely have a mostly flat area.

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So the yellow sections will be positive and the purple blue sections will be negative.

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So in this case, a fillet on an internal edge versus one on an external edge.

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Using tools like the Surface or Zebra Analysis are a great way to identify whether or not our design has consistent curvature

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in certain areas of the design.

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If we have a design that's intended for CNC machining or injection molding, they may have different requirements.

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So using these tools is a great way to analyze this.

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Also note that now we have an analysis folder and we can enable or disable or even edit these options as needed.

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What we're going to do is right click on Zebra, and in this case, what we want to do is delete it.

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We have the surface analysis here, which we can double click on to activate,

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or we can right click at the top level and turn off the analysis visibility.

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Let's navigate back to our blower assembly and just do one more thing inside of our Inspect and View tabs.

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Once again, the Inspect tab here is really looking at analyzing interference in our assembly.

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The View tab has options for things like section views,

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but it can also display I mate glyphs, degrees of freedom, the center of gravity of our assembly, as well as modify things like visual style.

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For example, if we wanted to see our model in a wire frame with visible edges only, we'd be able to do that by using the View tab.

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We can change it back to shaded with edges by modifying that option on the View tab as well.

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It's important to make sure that you can identify options within the Inspect and View tabs

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in both the Part and Assembly environments.

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Make sure that you play around with these before moving on.