One hundred twenty-five conceptual designers. A handful of engineers. Thousands of decision-makers. Seventy-two hours to take their input from idea to physical prototype in a trade show exhibit booth. Was this a trade-show stunt or factory of the future?

Inventor Ben Kaufman pulled off this collaborative feat at the MacWorld trade show in 2007. Outrageous or visionary, the exercise suggests the challenge of managing input and development concurrently-albeit under extreme circumstances.

For Kaufman, data flow was crucial to meeting his deadline. For more sophisticated manufacturing operations, seamless data flow is vital to understanding the aesthetics and performance of design ideas. [Read more…] about Go with the [Data] Flow – The Secret to Digital Prototyping

Description/Excerpt:
This is an issue that many people may never run into, but if you do you`ll realize it`s not fun! The problem comes about when you are using dependant views and you have reference sections pointing to another view and you modify the section mark in it`s length and/or head/tail location. If you place a reference section and say stretch it out, or need to change the head to the other side, the section will revert back to it`s original placement location (before you made any changes to it) as soon as you adjust the crop region in the dependant view. Please take a look at the attached video for a visual of the issue. This is from an actual project where the person had a lot of referenced sections. The video zooms into the dependant view so you can see the sections changing as the crop region was adjusted.

Source:
Revit ArchCenter

Description/Excerpt:
Hello everybody,

In our company we use punching and bending machines to produce sheet metal products. Our CAD software is inventor 11 and we are very satisfied. However, our CAM software for the punching and bending machines is TRUMPH`S software called TOPS 300 and TOPS 600 respectively. At the time our CAD/CAM process in the R&D department is the following. We design our assemblies in Inventor 11 and we export the drawings as dxf files. Afterwards, we use the TOPS CAM software. Therefore, when changes must occur in the inventor files we must delete the old dxf file and export a new drawing. This is a major problem because version mistakes may happen.
Does anyone know a CAM software for bending and punching machines that can be linked with inventor 11 to make the whole process more automated??

Source:
3DCADForums – Inventor Forum

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Description/Excerpt:
This tip is more aimed at those of you that create consumer products although I am guessing several of you that don`t necessarily design consumer products will be able to take advantage of the tip. The other day I was designing something and needed to take a flat face and replace it with a slight dome. If you look at most consumer products, they often have close to planer faces although they often have a very slight dome on them that can be difficult to create. It is possible to use a “loft to point” to achieve this although I wanted a little more control. I ended up running across an interesting work flow that is very easy and gives me the look I often want. This tip has already found several great uses for me and I thought it might be of use to some of you. I will use this on a very basic box to give you an idea of the technique.

Source:
Manufacturing Community

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Description/Excerpt:
I have a fairly simple early-schematic model. I started out by importing (linking) the autocad site plan and then working off of that. Then, it was decided that there would be two identical buildings on the site (at least for now), so I decided to link the building model into a site twice, to save on modeling time.
The problem is: after I imported the site plan, the file was loading really slowly, so I went back to the autocad drawing and discovered that it contained raster images that were turned off, making it a large file. I deleted and purged the images in the autocad file, then went back to Revit – no change, still slow loading. So I went into revit and purged decals and checked to see that there were no raster images attached. The file is still pretty large, like 27megs for a +/- 20,000sf building that has basically walls, floors and roofs, no groups, and one repeated truss family, and it is taking about 5 minutes to open.

Source:
AUGI Discussion Forum

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