Inventor Capturing & Reusing Design Intent

Jeff Wymer

Capturing and Reusing Design Intent

The Knowledge Vault contains a set of intelligent technologies for capturing, storing, and reusing the design knowledge embedded within your Autodesk Inventor models. iFeatures, iMates, iParts, and the Engineer's Notebook make up the basis of the Knowledge Vault. In this column we'll focus on iFeatures; we'll move on to iParts and iMates in the next two issues.

Defining iFeatures

iFeatures can be saved and reused in other designs. You can create an iFeature from any sketched feature. Inventor allows you to define the default locations for storing and accessing iFeatures, as shown in Figure 1. If you want to share iFeatures across your entire organization, you can define a network location for storage. To change the default, select Application Options under the Tools pull-down menu, and select the iFeature tab. You'll see that the default location is the Inventor install directory\catalog. The options available include

• iFeature Root, which specifies the location of iFeature files used by the View Catalog dialog box;
• iFeature User Root, which specifies the location of iFeature files used by both the Create iFeature and Insert iFeature dialog boxes;
• Sheet-Metal Punches, which specifies the location of iFeature files used by the Sheet-Metal Punch Tool dialog box.

These directories can be located either on your local computer or a network drive.

Creating iFeatures

To create an iFeature you must extract a feature you want to reuse from an existing part file. Open the part file, select the Tools pull-down menu, and select Extract iFeature. Now select the feature(s) that you want to catalog for reuse. You can either select the feature from the part-feature browser or directly from the model.

Once you've selected the features to extract, they will appear in the Selected Features area of the Create iFeature dialog box. To begin, rename the default prompt in the dialog box for the placement face, plane, and so on. I like to rename the prompt from "Position Geometry" to something more user friendly, such as "Select Face," "Select Center Plane," or "Select Center Point." If I'm defining a feature, I want to make sure I communicate to the others how to place it.