Autodesk’s most recent 2021 release of Inventor came equipped with a few noteworthy features – if you would like to read a comprehensive blog of what’s new, click here. For today’s topic, however, we will be focusing on one specific feature that we believe to be a game-changer for the Autodesk Inventor community.
It’s no surprise that automation has been a very hot topic over the last couple of years. Now, more than ever, businesses are looking for ways to increase efficiency, all while incorporating some form of repetition into their business model. Autodesk Inventor gives you exactly that by allowing for the creation of rule-based designs using iLogic. With iLogic, users can quickly automate their designs, while swiftly jumping over the hurdles of tedious and redundant tasks. While you can certainly create iLogic rules to automate processes on the drawing side of Inventor, Autodesk has now introduced an even quicker way to tackle this topic.
Drawing Automation
Inventor 2021 now has the built-in functionality to save sheet formats. Up until now, Inventor drawing templates were primarily used for the creation of new drawings with a specific sheet size and title block. Now, Autodesk has taken this one step further and added behind the scenes automation for even faster speeds. Users can now save sheet formats with specific drawing view layouts and drawing settings that can be applied to any design down the road. In addition, there’s a ‘Fit to View’ setting, which users can toggle when saving these formats to allow Inventor to automatically scale their future drawing views. Below, we’ll walk you through a few scenarios on how you can leverage this new functionality as soon as possible.
The first step will be to preconfigure your drawing sheet format. You can do this by inserting the different views you normally use, the settings and annotations and even notes that are typically found on your company’s standard drawings.
Once you are satisfied with the sheet format, the next step will be to right-click on the sheet you would like to save and select ‘Create Sheet Format.’
A great tip here is to make sure you are descriptive when coming up with a sheet format name, since other people in your company will be using these custom sheet formats. For instance, below you can see in this example that I made sure to include the number of views as well as the note that is to be included in this sheet format.
You will also note that there is an option to ‘Fit views to sheet’ checkbox, you’ll want to make sure this is checked to scale views accordingly based on the size of components and sheet size.
Once you click “OK” you have officially created a custom sheet format.
(Optional) Now that the Sheet Format is created, delete the sheet that was used to create the Sheet Format, unless you want the sheet available in drawings you create with this template.
You’ll want to save this file to your templates folder, whether that’s in the default location or a custom location, it does not make a difference.
When creating a new drawing you will want to navigate to your drawing template location and select the template you just saved.
You’ll notice something slightly different, however, on the right-hand side of this dialogue box you’ll see a column with a list of sheet formats you have saved.
After selecting the sheet format that was just created, Inventor will prompt you to select a file you would like to use in the new sheet you’re about to create.
Note that this can be an assembly or part of your choosing.
Once the desired part is selected, Inventor will drop in the parts accordingly and even scale them based on what best fits on the selected sheet.
Finally, you can even add a few simple iLogic rules to control spacing and dictate whether dimensions are included or not.
As mentioned before, all of this was previously possible with the help of iLogic, however, now Autodesk made it extremely easy for anyone to quickly decide on what they want their sheet format to look like and with the click of a button save those drawing views as a custom sheet format. We hope you enjoyed this quick walkthrough on Inventor’s new functionality.
