Wednesday, 15 August 2012

Augmented Reality for Showcase 2013

Those of you with Product Design Suite 2013 will have Showcase.

Take a look at this plug-in for showcase 2013 - It's amazing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YXdjNofHgI&feature=related

Thursday, 2 August 2012

Turn ON/OFF all Inventor Work Features at a touch of a button

How many times have you added a new work feature to Inventor and all of a sudden dozens of others are displayed again, just after you have turned them OFF from the VIEW ribbon?
At last I've got around to documenting this really useful feature. I programme the # key to toggle the display of all work features.

Run up Inventor, go to TOOLS/CUSTOMIZE and select the KEYBOARD tab. Find "All Work Features" from the "command name" list and add the key "#" as shown below. click on OK, and you can now toggle the Work Features display with one keystroke!!


This is broken in 2013!
However follow these notes carefully in order to get it to work in 2013.

Navigate to the path below and edit InventorCustomization.xml file using Notepad.
C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\Inventor 2013
Use the Find command in Notepad to locate "AppiMateGlyphVisibilityCmd"
Copy & paste the line below "AppiMateGlyphVisibilityCmd" keyboard shortcut.
Edit the second occurence as "AppAllWorkfeaturesCmd"=hex:06,00,00,00,01,00,de,00,0f,c8

Wednesday, 11 July 2012

Migrating Inventor 2013 styles, materials & appearances

If you are having problems migrating your Inventor Styles to the new 2013 format - then try this:-


Copy your previous 2012 design data folder to a new folder on the server.
Rename lighting.xml to lighting.xml.old
Migrate the newly copied styles library to 2013 by using the “style library manager”  utility.
Manually copy proteinmapping.xml across from a locally installed 2013 styles library.
Point to this new location in TOOLS/APPLICATION OPTIONS/FILES tab within Inventor 2013.

Now migrate custom materials & colours:

The custom material is defined as part of your Materials.xml and Colors.xml file in 2012. For 2013, you want to migrate the custom material into a custom .adsklib library.
  1. Start a new part.
  2. In the QAT, click Material Browser:
  3. In the browser toolbar, click Manage Migrate Inventor Styles.
  4. In the Migrate Styles dialog box, specify the Migrate From location which where the Materials.xml and Colors.xml files reside. By default the path is C:\Users\Public\Documents\Autodesk\Inventor 2012\Design Data in Windows 7.
  5. Specify the Migrate To location which is typically the InventorMaterialsLibrary.adsk file or a custom library you create. By default the path is C:\Users\Public\Documents\Autodesk\Inventor 2013\Design Data\Materials in Windows 7.
  6. Close and reopen the Material Browser.

Monday, 9 July 2012

Inventor 2013 supported CAD file versions

This is a useful list of Direct Translators Supported File versions for Inventor 2013

Translator Import Export
Alias v10 or later
CATIA V4 All Revisions
CATIA V5 R6-R21 R10-R20
Creo Parametric 1.0
IGES All Revisions 5.3
JT 7.0; 8.0; 8.1; 8.2; 9.0; 9.1; 9.2; 9.3; 9.4; 9.5 7.0; 8.0; 8.1; 8.2; 9.0; 9.1; 9.2; 9.3; 9.4; 9.5
NX 3-8.0
Parasolid Up to 24.0 9.0-24.0
Pro/ENGINEER Up to Wildfire 5.0
Pro/ENGINEER Granite Up to 7.0 1.0-7.0
Pro/ENGINEER Neutral N/A N/A
Rhino Up to 5.0
SAT Up to 7.0 7.0
SolidWorks 2003-2012
STEP AP214, AP203E2 AP214, AP203E2
STL N/A N/A
XGL/ZGL N/A