Using Autodesk Inventor to Create Tech Pubs on a Shoestring Budget

Kevin Robinson INCAT

MA105-5 In this session, youll learn how to take your CAD data and utilize it for those outside of engineering, such as sales/marketing professionals, customers, and field engineers. Well use TechSmith SnagIt, Autodesk Inventor data, and Autodesk Design Review to create the engineering support information that is always needed.

About the Speaker:

Kevin is an Autodesk pre-sales consultant at INCAT Systems, an Autodesk Reseller, working with customers to help them understand how to leverage Autodesk technology. Prior to INCAT, Kevin worked for Autodesk, creating sales tools for the Manufacturing Solutions Division. Kevin is a certified expert in both Inventor and SolidWorks. He got his start in the steel industry using AutoCAD and Mechanical Desktop where he designed slide gates. Kevin has 10 years experience applying CAD technology as an end user, administrator, technical support, trainer, demo jock, marketing, and sales engineering using Autodesk software. He has taught or presented to over 1000 users on Autodesk products, helping them realize their potential. krobinson@incat.com

Using Autodesk Inventor to Create Tech Pubs on a Shoestring Budget

Introduction
In a galaxy light years away living in a cubical with dim lighting back when Jedi Kevin had a real job doing mechanical design work. Jedi Kevin was asked to create images and screenshots of his AutoCAD based designs for service manuals and marketing brochures. In additional to his unmatched AutoCAD Drafting skills Kevin had another Jedi weapon called TechSmith SnagIt to create images faster and more effective than his co-workers using only print screenFADE MUSIC OUT..CUT.
As you can see this is some serious stuff At some point within you engineering career I am sure you have been asked to share your designs, drawings, and cad data with someone outside of engineering. Within this class we are going to walk through a few different types of methods of prepping your Inventor models and drawings for optimal use downstream. And we will all cover a wonderful third party application from TechSmith to assist sharing your design even more.

Links to tools other than Inventor discussed in this class:

www.techsmith.com Check out their www.autodesk.com/DWF

Class Overview
This class is broken out into four main areas: Inventor Core: Using the everyday commands and settings within Inventor to create models and drawings for almost any need downstream. o Application Options o Viewing Tools o Working the model o Drawing tools TechSmith Snag It: This nifty and affordable add-on allows any engineer to seem like Technical Publication Ninja, but it cant help poor technical writing.if that applies to you. o Basic screen grab and tweaking o Profiles o Kevins Favorites Time Based Grabs Spotlight / Magnify Underlay o Batch editing Inventor Plus: Using two of Inventors additional feature sets Inventor Studio and Presentation Files for even more power when sharing your designs outside engineering. Autodesk Design Review and DWF: Using this free application from Autodesk along with the DWF format you can empower even those without Inventor to access powerful CAD data for their needs.

Inventor Core
Inventor Application Options
Within the everyday workflows of Inventor parts, assemblies, and drawings there are tons of important settings and commands to be aware of in order to best represent any downstream need. Lets review these in more detail:

1. General Tab Here there a few basics that you need to tweak to get started on cleaning up the modeling screen and a few other adjustments a. Show 3d Indicator UNCHECKED - This little tool tip is nice for the beginner but once you are comfy with 3d its value is zilch, but this needs to be set to off in order to have your modeling environment with cad data only. b. Enable Pre-Highlight UNCHECKED Turn this off for a slight boost in selection performance, but for our purposes it helps eliminate focus on a single part unless needed.

2. Colors Tab These controls are going to allow a number of graphically tweaks a. Color Scheme PRESENTATION Choose this scheme as it is the friendliest for screen captures b. Background Color 1 Color This will be white by default, most common for technical publications. 3. Display Tab There is few hundred possible combinations on this tab, so I will cover just a few basics, but be sure to check these out. a. Shaded Active Edges This will allow you to toggle ON or OFF your edges and the color b. Show Hidden model edges as solid UNCHECK This will allow your 3d model to showed dashed lines while in 3d

Inventor Viewing Tools

We use these tools daily to navigate around our models so what else could there be that your not using. Well there are a couple important workflows that allow us to get around as needed for the best screen captures. 1. Glass Box (Common View) This tool which is accessed while in the Rotate Command by hitting Space Bar and or Right Clicking allows instant access to all the standard views with just a s single click.

2. Multi View (New Window) Simply add more camera views of your model using Window, New Window Command.

Working the Model

This next section focuses on the various tools you need to be comfortable in order to work with your dataset in order to rapidly get to various model states for your required screen captures. 1. Assembly Status The basics of turning part visibility on it off, plus a few more cool items. a. Visibility Basically you either see it or you dont b. Enabled Still kind of see the model, but you cant select it on screen, must use the assembly browser 2. Selection Filters These tools allow you to control what youre picking within the part or the assembly. This list can also be accessed by hitting CTRL + Right Click.

3. Selection Tools This menu will allow numerous options for quickly parsing down your dataset to exactly what you need.

4. Move and Rotate Commands Take your assembly apart for quick snapshots of you parts without worrying about creating presentation files. Both of these commands will override the current assembly constraints until the Update command is ran.

5. View Representations Save camera angle, model colors, part visibility settings so they are one click away at all times within the assembly. This is also great for drawings and Presentation files as well.

6. Positional Representations Similar to View Reps except that capture a parts range of motion for describing and showing motion.

Drawing Tools
This last section of Inventor Core will cover the need to settings and tricks within the drawing environment to aid in the production of supporting downstream needs. 1. Drawing Document Settings a. Sheet Color Be sure to change your sheet color to white for the most flexibility downstream.

b. Bitmap and Image Fidelity Adjust these two settings so your shaded view can look the best.

2. View Settings Each view type as a number of tweaks you can make in order to get your necessary images for your manual.

3. Technical Publication Templates Create an IDW template that captures all your favorite dimensions style, borders and Sheet Formats a. Sheet Formats allow you to capture a reusable configuration of view layouts and title blocks for rapid drawing creation.

TechSmith SnagIt
Basic Screen grabs and Tweaking
During the install SnagIt will ask you if you want to have minimized during windows start up, this is a YES. Basically SnagIt hangs out waiting to be called upon for your screen capturing needs with a simple keyboard shortcut or right-click Capture.

Lets go ahead and start discussing some of the basics of using the wonderful capture tool.

Your first screen capture

1. Region Select Out of the gate you will get to select a region on screen for which you want to make an image of. This is already light years ahead of old school print screen. As soon as you fire up the command, you will be prompted to drag and drop a region around whatever you want. After you select the default image tweaking window pop up for whatever you post capturing needs might be.

2. Tweaking Once the SnagIt Editor window pops up you can do almost anything us engineers would ever need post capture. Simple text callouts, cropping, captions, highlighting, drop shadows. You name it; it can do it one way or another.

Profiles
Ok once you get use to the basic Grab and Tweak workflow you can move to a few more types of SnagIt workflows using Profiles. These Profiles are pre-configured types of capturing combinations that can be changes are added to for your needs. Be sure to try a few of these that are helpful in everyday non-CAD related stuffthe Text Capture and Scrolling Window are really cool.

Kevins SnagIt Favorites

Basically I have been using this wonderful tool for about 10 years dailyso I have a few favorites that apply to my daily needs so I wanted to share those with you. 1. Time Based Grabs Basically I will setup a profile with whatever interval I want to use for continuous screen grabs, like every 15 seconds. Then combine the timer with Automatic File Naming and your all set

2. Spotlight & Magnify Many times when doing a screen capture I will want to call attention to a certain area of the user interface. This can be done using basic markup, but I like some of the tweaks you can make with this tool. Check out the timer setup below and how I can fade out the rest of the screen for context. a. Magnify Takes original size and scales it up b. Dim Grays out the rest as shown below c. Blur Fancy way to really have focus on a single area d. Drop Shadow Places a shadow around the selected region e. Position If you want to create more of an offset from the original area to help with the effect

3. Underlay Using this tool you can take two images and combine them to make a unique image after one has been altered from the original and or two images that have a different effect applied and you want them combined. I like to use this tool for combining the Realistic output from Inventor Studio with the Illustration Output from Inventor studio as well. Location of the tool below, example of using the underlay on the next page.

Underlay Example:

4. Batch Editing For every post capturing tweak or adjustment you want to make you can take a collection of images and run them all through a Batch Image edit car wash for easy adjustments. I use this all the time for adding drop shadows and changing of file types from BMP to PNG as an example.

Inventor Plus
Inventor Studio and Inventor Presentation Files
Both of these tools are subsets of the Inventor Package. I am going to highlight a few things within each as it relates to our topic of creating data we need for communicating downstream and outside of engineering, not the subset as a whole. Lets start with a few items from Inventor Studio.

Inventor Studio

1. Camera Creation Within Inventor Studio the camera tool is used for setting up preconfigured viewing orientations for both rendering and animations. Similar to View Representations from earlier both with a slightly quicker method for saved view and the addition of a rendering if desired. You can simply adjust your model view and then Right Click on the camera icon in the browser and choose Create Camera from View

2. Render or SnagIt Once you have a few Cameras setup you capture some images out using Render or SnagIt. If you choose render you have a ton more options for adding things like lighting and backgrounds to your images that are not that easy from the core assembly modeling area.

Note: If you decide to do a SnagIt screen grab here you will need to turn off the Visibility for the lights shown below:

3. Render Types: New in Inventor 2008 there are now two Render Types: a. Realistic For the traditional rendering applying lighting and color styles b. Illustration This is more of a comics book look and feel.

Inventor Presentation Files

Many of you have probably been in this environment a few times for creation of exploded views. Everything you already know about the creation of exploded view still applies and can be used for creating great screen captures for downstream. I just want to point a few tricks that might help you even more. 1. Auto Explode Use this to create a large offset between your parts, and then use the Timer setting in SnagIt to go through and grab images of everything you need very fast.

Example Auto Explode:

Autodesk Design Review and DWF

Every few months Autodesk releases a newer version of something DWF related. There are tons and tons of ways to leverage Autodesk Design Review and the DWF format. For the purpose of our discussion so far within this class we can use Autodesk Design Review with SnagIt to allow non CAD people to make there own captures. Below are a few high level things the DWF format will allow you to capture from your Inventor models that will allow the marketing group to take their own screen capture without nagging you. And a few setting in Autodesk Design Review that will make those non CAD people more effective. 1. Things DWF can capture: a. Drawings and 3d models Basically when you Publish DWF from Inventor you have a ton of choices: b. Assembly Instructions From your IPN files the task you create for each step of the process can also be viewed downstream, more time here will keep the marketing crew away. c. Assembly Positional Representations If you recall from earlier the Positional Reps. You create within and assembly can also be stored within a DWF file so anyone can see how your assembly functions.

2. Autodesk Design Review Settings and Non-CAD User Tools:

a. Background Color The default is not very screen capture friendly, so be sure to change it to the basic White

b. Gradient Setting Turn OFF

c. Non CAD user ease of use tools: Be sure to show them how to turn parts on and off, use the built in stand view tools, and maybe even the steering view controls.