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Sunday, March 11, 2012

Showing Total Mass on an Autodesk Inventor Drawing

May the Mass Times Acceleration Be With You.
Seen on a T-shirt

In a post a few weeks ago, I was asked "How do you show the total mass on a drawing?" 

I made some suggestions in the comments, but during a busy weekend, I decided to whip up this quick video tip. 

In short, create a text field, and insert the Mass property from your assembly onto your drawing.  You'll have the property and it will update when the assembly is updated.

Showing the property fields.
Supplementing the display of mass in the parts list, you can show the data in all of its forms!

So once again, here's a video to show the steps in all their glory! 


10 comments:

  1. Seriously.. God I feel dumb thats so easy. I laughed at myself for about a minute after watching this video.

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  2. DreamCharger. I'm glad this answered your question!

    I think we've all gotten "target fixation" where we looked so long in one area, we didn't think to look in another (I speak from experience on that one!)

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  3. Good work Jonathan,

    Now if I can figure out how to "incorporate" this into my parts list like our LISP routine does in AutoCad, I'll be a hero.

    All I get is, ..."well we can do this in AutoCad, why can't we do it in Inventor?" from the non-believers here at our company.

    Mike

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  4. Haha same exact thing here at our company Mike!

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  5. Hi.

    Is it possible to show total mass of two seperate assembly in one drawing?

    such as:

    "Total weight of assembly one : xx kg"
    "Total weight of assembly two: xx kg"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Erik,

      Have you tried using text and adding the mass property from the assembly? This sounds like it would do the trick for you.

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  6. Hi Jonothan,

    do you know if you can go further with that to get the total mass of the LOD?

    Cheers
    Elroy

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    Replies
    1. Elroy, I haven't tried this one myself. My first thought is that it might be a little dodgy when switching to different LODs (It might update based on the active LOD).

      However, I did search around, and I did find a link at one of the Autodesk groups that does offer up a selection.

      I haven't had a chance to try it myself, but I thought I'd share!

      http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-general-discussion/calculating-mass-for-various-levels-of-detail/td-p/3684204

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