Placing drawing views using Inventor

- The bottom line for most companies and for the users of AutoCAD is 2D drawings. Inventor has great tools for creating drawings and documentation, and in this movie we will place a couple of views on the drawing sheet and add an additional sheet to our drawing to begin the process of creating a working document. To do this, we'll start a new drawing file. In Inventor we have more than one format where we can create drawings. We have the DWG format, and we have the idw format. You'll notice that there are several templates available to predispose the standards that you use. In this case I'll use an ANSI millimeter drawing and tell it to create it. Starting from a blank sheet, let's place a couple of drawing views. The first view that we need is the base view. To place a base view, you can either select it from the create panel of the place views tab. Or for new users of Inventor, I strongly recommend using the marking menus to get used to these tools. I'll select base view. The dialog will open and since there is no 3D file open, Inventor will give me the opportunity to browse to the location of the file that I want. I'll find this C02, C02-01 assembly. Remember the icon is the stacked blocks. It give me a nice preview to make sure that that's the file that I want, and I'll select open. When I do this, I'm offered an initial view and I'm offered some options. For right now, let's just take a quick look at the orientation panel inside of the drawing view dialog box. In the 3D model your view cube has orientations for front, right, top, and bottom. Those correlate with the orientation options here. So for example, if I select the top view, in the orientation area, it changes that preview. Or, if I switch to one of the isometric views, it will offer me that view. In this case the front view is the one that I want. And I will place the initial view on my sheet and immediately Inventor allows me to place orthographic projections, as well as isometric views of my drawing onto the sheet. I right click, I'll select create, and we have our drawing views that fast. We can even have a little fun. A quick double click on any view and we're able to edit that view using the same dialog box that we used to place it. In this case we'll change the view to be a shaded view, and it updates the presentation of that view to make it a little more clear. Now I want to be able to add a little more detail to my drawings so I want to add another sheet. I'll move to the browser, right click on the drawing, and say, new sheet. Inventor will simply add another drawing page to the document. Once again, using the marking menu, I'll say that I want to place a base view, I'll select my file. In this case I'll use just an individual part file of the C02-01b part, I'll say open. In this case, once again, the front view was appropriate. We'll place a view, place a top view, a bottom view, a side view, and an isometric view. Now this view placement isn't necessarily ideal, so I can just simply drag the drawing view to relocate it, and note that the projected views maintain their orientation to their parent view. Placing drawing views on the drawing sheet is simple using Inventor. Using the 3D model to define what is needed for the drawing view, and letting the computer generate the edges, as well as hidden lines and other specialty line types, is much faster than creating those lines individually using the geometry based focus of AutoCAD.