Autodesk Inventor Assemblies Representations

In today’s blog we will discuss representations in Inventor assemblies, representations are used to give different views, positional changes and level of details. We will mainly focus on view representations and Level of Details in this blog. , in an assembly file there are 4 levels of detail – master, all components suppressed, Inventor also gives you the ability to build onto the default levels of detail you can create your own levels as required. , there are 2 view representations Master and View 1 again you can add to these.

Below is a description of the 3 Types of Representations are…

1. View: Gives the user the ability to create a saved state of their assembly, control of camera angles, part colours, visibility and whether parts are disabled or enabled (not suppressed).
2. Position: Shows the assembly in component locations and individual states (E.g. Cabinet Door Open and Closed)
3. Level of Detail: Maintains the resources of the computer by showing in the assemble only a specific sum of parts and suppress the remaining component’s or by simplifying or creating substitutes for the chosen assemblies.

What is the difference between turning the visibility off and suppression?

Turning the visibility of a part off will make the part in visible in the graphics window, surpassing a part will remove the part from the system memory it will not be cached by inventor in RAM.

When to use view representations?

A view representation should be used for the purpose of creating different views of the model. This can be for the assembly point of view or it can be used for the drawing point of view to easily show different assembly states on a drawing.

When to use Level of Details?

Level of Details should be used to allow the user to load particular parts of a large assembly without having to open the entire assembly every time. Level of Details are particularly useful in large assemblies that have thousands of parts, these types of assemblies are very heavy on you PC, so it is useful to break you assembly into different Level of Details to allow for better performance from your PC.

How to Create a View Representation?

Open an assembly and expand the Representations folder in the browser. You can see the 3 different types of reps we can create. Right click on the View: View 1 and click new, name your new view. Inventor will automatically activate it, if not double click on the new view to activate it. Right click on the View to Save the Camera View and choose Save Current Camera, double click the master to see the difference between the two view reps.

Create a new drawing choose base, under representation click on the View Drop down select the view you have just created in the assembly, click the associative tick box, this will update the drawing view if any changes are made to the view rep in the assembly. After the view rep has been created in the assembly you can right click and lock it this will prevent any changes from coming into the drawing view.

How to Create a Level of Detail?

To create a level of detail, select the parts you wish to suppress right click and choose to suppress. If you click the save button after suppressing parts you will be prompted to name your new level of detail.

Notice the difference between the file count at the bottom right of the screen of the Total Occurrences in Active Document and Open Documents in Session when cycling between the different Level of Details.

When opening a file up that has Level of Details and View Reps, in the open dialog box choose the Options button, this will give you the ability to choose which Level of Detail or View Rep of that assembly again if they assembly you are working with is very large then opening a Level of Detail would speed the process up and take pressure off your PC.