From the course: Autodesk Inventor 2018 New Features

Measure tool - Inventor Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Inventor 2018 New Features

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Measure tool

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- [Host] Regardless of whether you'll be designing models yourself, or perhaps simply collaborating with others, one of the most common tasks you'll take is to check the size and position of parts using the measure tool. Inventor has a single measure tool that combines a number of different measurement types into a single interface. Things like length, radius, angle and perimeter are all available. Let's take a look. You can access the measure tool in a couple of different ways. From the Inspect tab, you can select measure under the measure panel. Or you can right-click and select measure from the graphics window. Or you can right-click and select measure from the heads-up display. When the dialog box is presented, you'll notice a few different filters that are available to you at the top of the dialog. The one that is selected by default is faces and edges. But it will remember the last one that you used. You also have part priority and component priority. With faces and edges selected, as we hover over geometry in the graphics window, you'll see lines, edges, points and faces are all available for input to the measurement tool. If you set part priority, then as you hover over graphics, you'll actually see entire parts selected, rather than the geometry that makes up those parts. And then finally you have component priority. This is similar to part priority, but rather than selecting just individual parts, it will also select entire assemblies. Here you'll notice that as I hover over this carburetor assembly, the entire assembly is selected rather than the individual components within the assembly. Now before we get measuring, let's look at the dialog box itself. You'll notice that it's a floating window. What this means is it can be docked in a number of different places, depending on your needs and preferences, really. As you left click and drag the title bar, you'll notice as you near the ribbon bar, or the browser, you can release your cursor to dock the measure dialog box wherever you need. Now I actually prefer to dock it in the browser itself. And the reason for this is it simply gives me more room in the graphics window to work with my model. The nice thing is, it will remember where you place it. If we were to close this dialog box, by hitting the X on the tab, and then re-launch the command, you'll notice that it stays in the browser where I left it. At any time, you could drag it and re-dock it wherever you wish. It's a matter of preference as a designer.

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