Autodesk Inventor insider Kevin Schneider developed this detailed reference and tutorial to teach Inventor techniques. His straightforward explanations, real-world examples, and practical tutorials focus squarely on teaching vital Inventor tips, tricks, and techniques. Kevin's extensive experience and Inventor expertise allows him to teach the software in the context of real-world workflows and work environments, and present topics that are poorly documented elsewhere, such as design tactics for large assemblies, effective model design for different industries, strategies for effective data and asset sharing across teams, using 2D and 3D data from other CAD systems, and improving designs by incorporating engineering principles.
The book begins with an overview of Inventor design concepts and application before looking at all aspects of part design, including solids vs. surfaces, sketching, part features, tolerances, and more. The advanced part design chapter explores machined, cast, turned, plastic, and sheet metal parts, as well as sheet metal flat patterns, part reuse, and part analysis. The next chapters focuses on assembly basics and discuss everything from design intent to skeleton or master modeling to constraints, weldments, assembly reuse and configuration and troubleshooting. The advanced assemblies chapter discusses assembly representations, strategies for working with large assemblies, bolted connections, degrees of freedom, mass properties, interference analysis, and more. The content center chapter looks at libraries and families, and the functional design overview discusses engineering vs. modeling with functional design as well as calculators and generators. The routed systems chapter then explores pipe, tube, hose and wire harness design as well as proper routing, styles, and reporting. The frame design chapter covers everything from using skeletons to cut lists, and the weldment design chapter looks at cosmetic and physical welds, operations, and more. The simulation and motion chapters explore everything from preparing designs to interpreting and sharing results. The detailed documentation chapter covers everything from presentation files to simple animations to documentation for exploded views, sheet metal flat patterns, and more. The following chapters offer overviews of Inventor tools, data exchange, and Inventor Studio. Next, collaborative strategies and set ups are covered before exploring how users can customize Inventor to their needs. Finally, an overview of the Inventor API discusses basic VBA macros and Inventor add-ins.
Mastering Inventor's CD features all the tutorial files necessary to complete the book's exercises, useful utilities, and a trial version of the Inventor software.
