Thursday, 18 February 2016

One LOD To Rule Them All

NEVER use more than on LOD (Level of Detail) in the drawing, especially for large assemblies.


I see this problem ALL THE TIME, new or experienced users so, even if it’s not a proper blog I need to get this out… you all need to know, understand and remember this.

LOD is a memory tool not to be used in the drawings. Each LOD will load in to memory all the parts as if they were new parts even if they are just occurrences (duplicates).

Say you have an assembly of 1000 parts and you create a LOD where you suppress 1 element. If you use these two LOD’s on separate views in the same drawing then the number of occurrences will be 1000 + 999 = 1999 instead of 1000. Inventor treats each LOD as a separate assembly in the drawing!!!!



You will see a huge increase in size and you will impact performance severely.

Use Design View Representations to document different views and if you need to use LOD then have one per drawing (all sheets) like “All Content Center Suppressed” and differentiate the changes with Design View Representations.

                Now you can filter Parts List for “Design View Representation” and document a specific configuration on each Parts List but the Quantity will come from the full assembly (2017 has a fix on this).

                For now, to fix the quantity you need to look at iAssemblies. My notes on this here.

                Take a look at Large Assembly Instructions.pdf.

                You might want to suppress some of the views and turn them on when you need to work on them.

Now, repeat after me: “I swear to use only one LOD for each drawing, cross my hart and hope Inventor crashes if not”.


Later,

ADS



photo credit: Vanishing Point (license)

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