From the course: Autodesk Inventor 2022 Essential Training

Explore major workflow steps - Inventor Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Inventor 2022 Essential Training

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Explore major workflow steps

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- When starting a new course on Autodesk Inventor I find it very helpful to step back and provide everyone with an overview of what Autodesk Inventor does and go over a few basic workflow steps. So everyone has a good understanding of why we are here and where we're going. During this course we'll be working with different parts and assemblies. But to cover the basic workflow concepts, I like to fall back to the toys that allow me to do the things I do today, the trustee LEGO. The reason for this is nearly everyone on the planet will recognize what they are and how they work without too much explanation. And it allows me to easily explain the concepts. I see Legos as one of the most basic physical prototyping tools around. You have a bucket of standard parts and you snap them together in different configurations to build anything you can dream of. Autodesk Inventor is a digital prototyping tool that allows you to build parts like a single Lego brick, or parts of an engine and then put them together and test how they would function before you actually have to manufacture any parts. But in Autodesk Inventor, rather than starting from a bunch of predefined bricks that you might pull out of a bucket stored in your closet you're actually pulling parts that you've built from a folder on your hard drive. The workflow in Inventor can be broken down into three major steps, building parts, assembling parts and documenting your designs with drawings. When building parts, you'll sketch 2D shapes and then use 3D modeling operations to add or remove material to sculpt a part. I've captured a few images to show how you might build a simple Lego brick in Inventor, so that you can better understand the process. Once you've built the parts you need for your design you can begin pulling them into an assembly file and connecting them, in this case to build a simple Lego house. Once you understand the software you'll be able to build much more complex parts and assemble those to build something more advanced. Last, but certainly not least, you must be able to document your design so that when the time comes you can have those parts manufactured. This will be done by creating views of your parts and assemblies, that will be used to completely define how the parts should be manufactured. The beauty of the entire system is that all parts and assemblies and drawings are connected. So if changes are made to any part the assembly that contains the part and the drawing that contains that part are updated instantly. So you can focus on your designs rather than wasting time, redrawing 2D views of your parts.

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