Inventor for Woodworkers - Joinery, Millwork and Cabinetry Design Accelerators

[PaulMunford]

I've created this post to give a little more room to a discussion that I've been having with @ScottMoyse on Twitter.

If you are using Autodesk Inventor in the Building trades - specifically for Woodwork, what design accelerators, features, tools or functions would you like to have in Inventor? Not the mundane stuff that everyone could use, but specific stuff that could be rolled into an 'Inventor for Woodworkers' type addin.

I hope that the point of this thread will be to demonstrate the desirability of such a plugin. One position that Scott and I disagree on is WHO would provide this sort of service.

I am of the opinion that Autodesk doesn't do a lot of industry specific tool sets. Instead, they provide their API for free and let third party programmers provide these sort of products. The most popular third party products (or those that can be seen to have cross industry benefits) are often bought up by Autodesk and included in the main product.

I am also keen to explore how some of us are using and adapting Inventor's current toolset for Joinery detailing.

Finally, If you are not using Autodesk Inventor perhaps you would like to point out great features in other software titles that you would like to see in Inventor.

(If you are an Autodesk Inventor addin programmer who is looking for an Idea for a new product - perhaps this thread will be interesting to you!)

[b.blackwood]

Hi,

We had this issue when 2010 came out.  We thought it was great news that we could crash ahead with multibody parts, but soon realised that it was impractical to then get a cuttinglist for the shop floor from the model.

We found a plug-in for Inventor called Analyser from Ogeetek and bought it a some considerable expense.  Among other things, this little program does exactly this, it reads the solid to obtain the cutting list.  So gets the true size of the panels no matter what your perameters are. Also, it reads a .SAT file of your multibody model, so it doesnt care whether you have a mulitbody part or an assembly.

HOWEVER, the Analyser doesnt read the names of the solids, so you get all the parts you want cut to the right size, but it bears no reference to your drawing, so you dont know where the parts go once they are cut!  Our peices are always bespoke and often contain a lots of parts.  So this is a showstopper.

So we are so close, yet so far.

[imark-TP]

Paul, good morning

I have 25+ years experience in the millwork drafting/engineering field.

If you want Inventor to work for the millwork business simply look at Planit, Cabinet Vision. I've used Inventor for millwork and it's fantastic for custom design work. Once you get into the joinery and post processing thats where a great deal of additional work needs to be done with Inventor.

Obviously parametric cabinets are a must, but the ability to change drawer combinations, or doors to drawers, add edging, to easily export data for cutting panels, I mean the list goes on and on.

Like I said, being experienced with both Inventor and Cabinet Vision, as much as I enjoy working with Inventor (to the point of forgeting to go home at the end of the day), for millwork, Cabinet Vision hands down.

Hope this helps.

Terry

[scottmoyse]

Yeah and ogeetek stopped supporting it beyond 2010!!!

[scottmoyse]

That is true until you need curved cabinety and cabinetry with compound angled backs to fit into boat hulls etc. Then it falls over and Inventor wins out...

Does Cabinet Vision now support custom moldings etc?

[imark-TP]

Absolutely! Custom profiles and now you can build several moldings together into a molding assembly. The beauty is you just need to create a path on your case work, pick the moulding profile and its done including the mitres.

Curved and mitred casework is also easily done with Cabinet Vision. The biggest issues with cabinet vision are the graphics and CAD abilities. This is where Inventor kicks it. I'm not sure how to decribe it but I've heard CV is not a "true" 3D modeler which would explain some of its "drafting" shortcomings. 3D drawings, sure it will give you a fully rendered drawing for the client to ooo and ahh over....pretty straight forward stuff for this day and age.

Still the ability to within a few minutes, create a cabinet, generate a cutlist and numerous other reports and create a basic cabinet drawing. Thats why CV is so useful, time is money.

I did work for a company that has used Inventor for millwork. Again fantastic at the front end but once it was time to get the BOM shop ready, parts optimized, and shape files made ready for CNC. All the time saved making the assembly in Inventor...gone due to processing for the shop.

[scottmoyse]

Really? So you are saying you could design this in CV:

See all those varying compound angles on the back of that settee?

The moldings thing sounds like a definite improvement.

The only annoying part of getting documentation to the floor for us, is defining Length, Width & Thickness. This is the case for all Inventor users (apart from sheet metal). However, we have just about automated everything else.

Does CV produce, dimension and detail all the drawings automatically? or do you have to create them?

Does CV have an API?

[imark-TP]

Yes, in my opinion this would be doable in CV. Although I'm sure there would be differing opinions on how to achieve those compound angles using CV.  I've seen some pretty amazing parametric items done with CV.

The thing with those shaped parts is once you start optimizing the parts, the code for shaping those parts is also created, no third party software....just send to the machine.

The one company I worked for uses parameters extensively. Parameters that include deductions for edging, for cut and finished part dimensions etc. They have taken that part farther than anyone I've seen locally.

CV automatically dimensions as soon as a view is brought in. The dimensions can be customized to a point, you can specify a string to have the door and drawer face with reveals, toe and cabinet dimensions, then the overall dimension.

It works pretty good for the most part, you can add custom dimensions too. I still though prefer Inventor though for the drafting part. CV still has a LOT of work to do to be more user friendly in that regard.

Not sure about the API.

[scottmoyse]

so how can it handle grain matching between parts on output to CNC?

[imark-TP]

Let me put it this way, I'm not sure how it deals with the optimzation, but in the 2011 version you could specify grain matched fronts. I never had the opportunity to use this feature as we outsourced our doors and drawer faces at the time, so i'm not 100% sure how the software accomplishes optimization. I can't imagine that CV would enable you to grain match and yet not optimize the parts correctly.

Again, I'm not trying to sell CV, I just believe that if you were going to create a wood working Inventor, CV would be a good place to look, at least in north america.

[scottmoyse]

Yeah, when we had an opportunity to swap, CV just wasn't mature enough. Non of those "Kitchen Cabinet" style software packages were. eCabinets was quite powerful considering it was free as well, but suffered from the same restrictions at the time.

We have Inventor fairly well optimised for what we do via API customisation. As i said the most annoying "repetitive" part is creating sketches in each part to define LWT, for the BOM & Parts list. Otherwise we have it nailed.

[imark-TP]

Oh I would gladly use Inventor over CV at the front end. At the time for us, yes it was primarily a kitchen cabinet shop, Inventor couldn't complete time wise and having both go head to head, CV just gave us more bang for what we needed.

There were some cases, like an oval library paneling project I worked on, where Inventor worked perfectly for the overall design then once I had all my curved panel dimensions I used CV to create each curved panel for fabrication purposes only.

Scott...you don't happen to work for a company called Milltech?....just kidding. I know they have been pretty succesful in using Inventor for millwork. It just was all the processing, after the fun Inventor work was done, that drove me up the wall.....lol. I know they created a parametric cabinet library for the basic door drawer cabinets...I lost count how many they cataloged. They were all completely parametric and had all the deductions for edges and were linked to excel speadsheets for ease of editing. Pretty straight forward. 

[scottmoyse]

No we do super yacht interiors in New Zealand. www.smigroup.co.nz 

[b.blackwood]

I didnt know that about the support.  My personal experience is that it was never really supported at all.  Darren has been a great help over the phone, but the software was never implemented properly, and withuot being a wizz in VB its impossible to fix it yourself.

Im going to try a few things this morning, if I can get the Analyzer to recognise anything from the part properties, I can create a cutting list and sort it in excel and do the same in Inventor and they MIGHT come out the same.  Will see and let you know.

Interesting to see you do yachts, we recently completed a roof with interocking compound curved formers (in both planes) (about 12,000 of them), which we constructed exactly as an upside down yacht.

Many thanks

[scottmoyse]

That roof sounds cool. Please let me know how you get on with 3d analyser.

[b.blackwood]

Thanks.

Well, I have updated my AlphaCAM to open STEP files, which is handy so the solution we have for the LENGTH/WIDTH/THICKNESS conundrum is:

1. Draw multibody solid (or assembly, it doesnt matter) - NO PARAMETERS REQUIRED

2. Save as STEP file.

3. Create new .assy

4. Place the STEP file as a sub assy in your new assy file.

5. Place a view of this and balloon as PART NAME baloons.

6. Export the contents of the STEP file to 3D Analyzer.

7. As you export each part, manually type in the PART NAME from Inventor, into the PART TYPE box in 3D Analyzer.

8. 3D Analyzer now generates your cutting list with L/W/T for each one.

9. Sort the cutting list with the PART TYPE as the first field

10. Voila: you have a parts list which is correct, and the items correspond to your drawing, and you can open the STEP file in AlphaCAM without inputting any parameters or splitting out any solids to parts.

You should be able to export flat patterns dicectly from 3D Analyzer to AlphaCAM (and do the touch-type machine routines) but mine doesnt at the moment as it hasnt been set up correctly, Ogeetek are comming to have a look at it in a couple of weeks.

The route is not the simple process we wish it was, but it works and saves hours of time especially on large bespoke items like the ones we mostly do.  If anyone is keen on some more info on this, please let me know.

B.

[scottmoyse]

That sounds great, but I won't really be interested until Ogeetek gaurantee they are going to update 3D analyser every year for each new release of Inventor.

[Anonymous]

I  like to be able to use inventor for projects with lasercut wood.  It would be great if more features like  fingerjoints, living hinges etc would be easier to insert. Also flat sheet and nesting would be great. I have looked into the sheetmetal feature and you can choose wood there, but you cannot bend it.  There is a boxdesigner on the internet which can do fingerjoints and living hinges but only for a very limited number of boxshapes.

I