Francisco Perez-Smith

Setting up the Nesting Utility in Autodesk Inventor

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Autodesk’s Product Design and Manufacturing Collection (PDMC) now comes with an embedded nesting utility for Inventor, and it’s fantastic. Part of the economy of sheet metal manufacturing comes from the ability to cut component parts out of a single sheet of… well, sheet metal. In order to minimise wastage, it is important to maximise the …

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Inventor DWG vs IDW

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A few years ago, Autodesk greatly improved the interoperability between Inventor and AutoCAD by allowing them to open each other’s drawings. Traditionally, this meant the IDW and DWG formats respectively. Soon, it became possible to save Inventor drawings in the DWG format. However, confusion arose as ‘Inventor DWGs’ were not the same format as ‘AutoCAD …

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The Contact Solver in Autodesk Inventor

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Have you ever noticed how, for assemblies with moving parts, Inventor doesn’t seem to mind components running through each other? Wouldn’t it be better if the components hit each other and stopped, rather than behaving like eerie ghosts? If you’re interested in achieving exactly this, read on! Interference by Design Believe it or not, this …

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Inventor Project Files: What are they and what do they want from us?

Inventor project files: what are they, and what do they want from us? This extraordinarily short guide explain it all! In a nutshell In a nutshell, project files let us organise our designs in a flexible way. Within a project file, we are able to define: Which appearance libraries are to be used, Which materials …

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Network Rendering with Autodesk Backburner

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Introduction Have you ever wanted to set up a render farm for your Autodesk products? Well you’ve had the power the entire time, in the form of Autodesk Backburner. Backburner is a bundle of programs that allow users of 3ds Max, Maya, Flame, Flame Assist, Flare or Lustre to use multiple computers in order to …

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Illustrated Guide: Using the Drawing Resource Transfer Wizard in Inventor

The Drawing Resource Transfer Wizard in Inventor is a handy tool for copying title blocks, borders and sketch symbols between drawings. This is particularly useful if you are ever tasked with updating the title blocks of a multitude of different drawings. Below is an illustrated guide demonstrating how to perform this action efficiently. Steps1. Before …

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