Share company standards

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Share company standards.

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After completing this video, you'll be able to share material libraries, share styles,

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access the application options, and import a customized Application Options XML into your current session,

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and determine the default thickness that is set within your active sheet metal style.

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Inside of Inventor, we're going to begin at our home screen and navigate once again to our project settings.

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Note that our project settings use standard style libraries, and these are generally set to read only.

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We also have access to our appearance libraries and our material libraries directly in here.

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We can add to these libraries and change whatever application options are needed for our specific project.

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Note that in order to change the style library from read only to read write,

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we need to make sure that there are no files currently open in the project and we can set it to read only or set it to read write.

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It's important to set the styles library to read write whenever we are creating or modifying our styles library,

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but keep in mind that this is something that is not generally done when you work within an organization.

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Often times, a CAD admin will be the one to create your style library

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and work with you to make sure that it is imported into your active project.

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So let's take a look at our active project.

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Inside of our active project, we want to begin by first taking a look at our application options.

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Application options configure all sorts of things about the project inside of Inventor.

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If you have application options saved externally,

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you can use the import functionality to import that XML file that can be used for your specific application options.

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Often times different types of Inventor projects will have different requirements.

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Whether it's changes to things like iFeature authoring, Content Center, or even just the way that certain objects are displayed.

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Changing those application options one by one can be time consuming,

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so using an XML file that contains all of the changes for your different projects is a great way to speed up your productivity.

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Now that we have a better understanding of our application options, let's go ahead and start a couple of new files.

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First, we're going to create a standard part.

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We also want to create a new part that's going to be a sheet metal part,

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and we want to create one more part that's going to be a standard assembly.

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First, let's take a look at our standard part.

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By going to our Manage tab, we're going to take a look at our Styles Editor.

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Note that on the right-hand side, we have Save Styles to Style Library, we have Update, and Purge Styles.

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Inside of our styles editor, we also have the option to import styles.

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just like with our application options, often times it's required to have specific styles, whether it's certain text, font or size,

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or information about the lighting and environment inside of the UI.

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You might want to use those external styles imported into your current active project.

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Note that in this case, for a standard part, we see lighting, mark and text.

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If we go to our sheet metal part, once again, going to the Manage tab in the Styles editor,

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note that we're going to see a different option here for sheet metal rule and sheet metal unfold.

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When we're working with sheet metal parts, it's important to note that there are some defaults,

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for example, the default inch and metric sheet metal rules.

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With each of these rules, we can make adjustments by expanding our sheet metal rule and we can take a look at the defaults.

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If we need to create a new rule, once again, we would want to make sure that our library is set to read write,

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or that we import rules that are standard in our organization.

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We can start by creating a new sheet metal rule.

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In this case, I'll leave it as copy of default.

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We could modify things like the sheet metal thickness value to .06

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and all the rest of the rules, for example, the K factor and the thickness values will all be inherited from that value.

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We can make modifications to these if we want, as long as we save edits along the way.

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The K factor unfold method can be done from a bend table, a custom equation, or by using the linear method.

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Depending on the material that you're using and the K factor required for your bend radius,

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you may want to make adjustments to these values.

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We also have bend compensation values, which again are some standard equations that are used for bends that are between 0 and 90°

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from 90 to 165 and 165 to 180.

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These values can be adjusted in addition to the K factor and other factors inside of our sheet metal rules.

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For this, let's go ahead and save and close and move on to our assembly.

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Once again, going to Manage, we can see that we've got our Styles Editor.

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Notice that we don't see Mark here, but we only see lighting and text.

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Depending on the part or assembly style that you're working within, you'll see different options inside of the Styles and Standard Editor.

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If we want to save a certain style externally, we can select it from our list, right click, and use Export.

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This will allow us to export a specific style from our Styles and Standard Editor that can be imported into another project or another design.

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At this point, let's go ahead and close the assembly and the parts.

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There's no need to make any saves and then we can move on.