Page Last Updated And Links Checked: 16 July 2003 Page Last Updated And Links Checked: 16 July 2003 Inventor Introduction
inventormdt/invmdtintrorave.html The intro that rakes over issues effecting Inventor and MDT is retained for reference on a separate page within a folder of similar material I have collected. See also inventormdt/index.html which is the index of the material accumulated in that folder that includes the 5 to 5.3 kernel change, things that need fixing in Inventor 6 (not a wish list!) and snippets from some forum postings.
Inventor Modelling Tutorials (html/PDF)
www.mymcad.com Inventor (and MDT) resources. Most valued for the Tips and tricks many of which are concise mini tutorials with pics, then there are answers to hundreds of frequently asked questions (FAQ's) with good learning value and finally extensive links. When in the site look for either Inventor or MDT in the small print nav bar across the top. Canadian site. Recommended.
hera.eeginc.com/autodesk/au/session_list.cfm Autodesk University 2002 Handouts (link also on MDT page).
Can choose to download the material (unzipped) from any individual presentation or if you wish can take all, say, Manufacturing, Architectural/AEC or Customization and Programming related presentations down in single zip files. I saw Inventor (by Neil Munro), MDT and Revit presentations.
www.ktei.net/comm_tech_sub_site/inventor.htm *First page of a series of pages that are genuine high school absolute beginner stuff. Good. I started the Inventor (Page2) Tips and Reminders on the basis of it. Print!
*Also the layout itself provides the basis of a lesson plan /course outline that can be used on a first course.
www.ketivtech.com/html/Inventor%20Tips.htm Ketiv's Support Tips
*Very good. Hot Tips and mini-tutorials. Some short avi files. Mainly their own tuts. Some links off their site. Particularly see their sweep tutorials.
www.cadcim.com/inventor/inventor.htm Sham Tickoo's Inventor sample chapters.
sfcc.cc.mo.us/staff/TI/Syllabi/CAD/DRFT134.pdf A 15 week program based on Elise Moss's IV R5 book. Use the program and or the program and current book.
www.schroff.com/../ Index page leading to the tutorials that include Elise Moss's R6 version of the book above.
www.mossdesigns.com Elise Moss' Tips and Tutorials.
Access to some parts of her site do not come up from the nav bar but I have accessed them by typing in the urls of the individual pages directly (or otherwise probing around) and have copied off some files for my own local refeence. Revit tutorials also need to be accessed in this way.
However Inventor Tips & Tricks, Links, Free Downloads, Books are all interesting and all come up. Elise Moss is a prolific author and there is a link to obtain sample books (via the Books link or go to www.sdcacad.com) if you are an instructor.
Links immediatly above also apply to her books.
web.media.mit.edu/~saul/tutorials *How to save an Inventor part (.ipt) to dxf, dwg or a bmp. Very concise. Very good. Good sceenshots.
www.sdotson.com Sean Dotson's website.
A practical user who knows Inventor. See Tutorials, VBA, Links and Forum in the top nav bar. Tuts are good (pdf). He uses a top nav bar system like I do (and a CSS guru in Tasmania).
www.sdotson.com/freetut/Tips%20&%20Tricks.pdf His 14 page pdf Tips And Tricks.
www.cadforum.cz/../ CAD Studio (Czech based but in English). Called a forum but is a extensive list of Questions and Answers for AutoDesk products. Best described as Tips rather than FAQs. No tutorial as such but plenty of gems you may be able to use.
www.caddigest.com/../ CadDigest Inventor Tutorials listing. On 15June03 I counted 57 tutorials (discounting Algor and Sevice Pack references). 20 were streaming video or avi or whatever, 13 pdf (10 sDotson, 3 Adesk Uni), 24 html (11 real like Cadence(8),Cadalyst(1),CadDigest(1)andDigitalCad(1) and 13 Adesk ranging from tips submitted by users to full articles by people like Fane or Monro with pics and file downloads).
www.caddigest.com/cdw/archives/cdw_012203.htm Jan 2003 Cad Digest Archieves. I checked content against link above and the only article not current at 16 June 03 is added to this page below. (*Link kept for reference only to stop me checking it out again in the future.)
www.cadonline.com/reviews/software/cad/0103inventor Only article in the achieve above which is not in the 16 June 03 CadDigest Inventor Tutorials listing. Bill Fane on Inventor 6 surfacing/solid modelling relationship. Good.
Check out Google search of
cadalyst + inventor + tutorials (that's how I independantly found the Bill Fane MDT tut archieved above)
caddigest + inventor + tutorials
digitalcad + inventor + tutorials (there is at least one by Elise Moss)
mdt, revit?
Modelling Tutorials (Streaming Only)
go.cadwire.net/?271,6,1
Aimed at High School students. Stream on-line and download as well. Three avi files about 45 minutes each.
Customizing Tutorials
www.autodesk.co.uk/../ Pt 3 of Autodesk Inventor VBA/API
Placing a custom marker in the Center of Gravity.
Note 1: the back link to Pt 2 did not come up but the code from the earlier parts (P1,P2) is supplied so you can carry on and do Pt 3. Downloaded code is in acadinvcust/2346948_Cog_B.zip.
Note 2: Author is Neil Monro (email address provided). See link below and do search for him at autodesk and search Google). He also did Inventor presentations at Autodesk University 2002 (see link above in Modelling Tutorials).
pointa.autodesk.com/local/enu/portal/inventor/tips
Neil Munro's How-To Articles and Tips.
Inventor Parts And Code
www.mymcad.com/KWiK/Mcad.htm Kent Keller's iParts and Code Site.
www.cbliss.com/inventor Charles Bliss's iParts and iCode Repository. See the top nav bar to choose from Parts, iParts, iCode and Materials. ** In particular see the iCode page for 3D Text Tool for creating closed loops of TrueType text into Part Sketches.
www.inventorparts.com Charles Bliss site under construction to eventually be dedicated to Work Inventor Parts, Inventor Code / Macros and general Inventor information.
hjem.get2net.dk/opad Patrick de Stobbeleir's Inventor Tool Site. Some code.
www.oocities.org/olegermer/index.html
Ole Germer's Site (Timken bearings, Involute Gears, Roller Chains etc.)
inventoruser.autodesk.com An AutoDesk website dedicated to Inventor. Started in Oct 2002. Suppose to be tips, tutorials, articles and more but seems to be just offering some free parts downloads which they say they reserve the right to start charging for and a link to a commercial parts supplier. The left nav bar includes 'Training' which links to Inventor and a couple of MDT tutorial/articles. I'm not real sure where these pages are. All in all it's not much of a 'dedicated Inventor' site.
Forums
discussion.autodesk.com/../ Autodesk's Inventor Support Discussion forum.
groups.google.com/../ Google's autodesk.inventor.support forum.
www.sdotson.com/forum Sean Dotson's forum.
Avatech
www.avatechsolutions.com/products Avatech's product range.
Beside the training media note 'Proof Positive' which checks the quality of Inventor models. Holes within holes and solids within solids for example. Buried features and other flaws would be of interest to an Instructor assesing a model. From an applied viewpoint such embedded features could limit parametic editing or confuse confuse analysis applications such as CNC program generators and FEA programs. The only shortcoming of the program is that you can't test for underconstrained sketches within part features. Bill Fane saw the software and is impressed.
Needs Sorting
www.rhino3d.com/tutorials/howto/helixspring/helixspring.htm *** Out of place but print and adjust location later (include in spring/thread section of acad work?) ***
www.cadpanel.com *A new interesting AutoCad site by a guy who has written books in Farsi. Has Autolisp (good! all his own work, nice dialog boxes ...see helix with dialog box), cusomizing, tips, bugs and more fo A2004. Initially put in my customizing page.
www.capturepad.com Free screen capture software. S. Dotson said he liked it better than the one he paid for. CapturePad is a video capture utility which allows you to capture any screen activity into standard AVI file, JPG sequence and even into Flash SWF file. Besides that CapturePad works with any video hardware attached to the computer so you can easily grab and save a video from your webcam, tv tuner, etc.
Seems you can make it record you actions on screen or set the reposition components (say in MDT by rolling the Edit 3D Constraints value box for example) and then capture that image in that position in order to make videos or avis or flyovers and the like. Looks good any way.
There are desciptions ("short manuals") on-line describing how to use CapturePad in it's various roles.
www.fraps.com For a free screen capture program by games playing enthuisiast. Completely free. Good people, no commercial associations at all. Recommended by Paul Houlker in the MDT6 Discussion Group posting referred to above. He advocates rolling the wheel in the Edit 3DConstraints value box to generate the movement.
www.cadencoding.com Recommended by Afralisp.
A lot happening on this site. Tutorials, articles, e-books, forum. Seems to be a product of the Afralisp and VBDesign. All code that works with Autocad; Autolisp, DCL, VisualLisp and VBA. I also saw references to ActiveX and html with AutoCAD. There is more including some angst over php and XML.
**See Kenny Ramage's Kitchen in particular:-
VBA Steel Project which is a misnomer because he does a drawn steel cross-section selected from a dialog box in VBA, VisualLisp and Autolisp with DCL (all on one page!) so you can see for yourself how similar in principle these different languages are.
HTML and AutoCAD. Again Kenny uses VBA, AutoLisp, Visual Lisp and adds VB to write some AutoCAD layer information to a HTML file!
Also see his Autolisp Primer under Tutorials **
www.dsxcad.com For (freeware) DSX Tools by David Stein author of the (free to download) The Visual LISP Developer's Bible 2003 Edition.
DSX Tools is a freeware add-on for AutoCad. It provides a collection of useful time-saving features for layer management, text management, dimensioning, blocks, drawing files, and so forth. Written entirely in Visual LISP and compiled to VLX, it also comes with several source code files, documentation, customizable help content and quite a bit more.
Choose either the version for for AutoCAD2000-2002 or AutoCAD2004 (the A2004 version won't work in A2000-2002.
Downloads are Microsoft Installer files (.MSI) version 2.0. You must have MSI 2.0 installed to run these (a link to download MSI 2.0 from Microsoft is provided).
The Visual LISP Developer's Bible 2003 Edition (Adobe PDF Format) was the result of reading everything on Autolisp and seeing that treatment of visual Lisp was just a tack-on at the end. He gives a fuller treatment of Visual Lisp. He could not find a publisher. The pdf file is 2.7Mb (about 480 pages at my 180 pages a meg assumption) and the code sample (sample.zip) is 28kb).
Note: From general reading I was not sure I have the capacity to work in Visual Lisp and earlier decided to stay with Autolisp and perhaps a bit of DCL to go with it for interest. Access to this work could alter this for me in purely interest terms. From practical reality the VBA vs VLisp issue remains. Try reading some of his articles which address this. As usual its horses for courses or where your background experiece lies which is a big factor.
www.fortune.com/../ Article on a Canadian company QNX who provide seriously reliable operating systems for situatios were systems work or someone dies sort of thing. They have been offering a free download of there operating system fo PCs but only a few wizards know about them because of the niche they work in. Microsoft entered their space (well the fringes) in 1996 and predicted QNX would be crushed in two years. Did not happen. Private company, no venture capitol, they just built it up. Secret is microkernal 40 kB with everything else outside and backed up. Micrcosoft and Linux are monolithic kernal, one thing fails it all goes down. You can get or download a Knoppix like CD that allows you to play with it from the CD prior to any decision to install it.
www.qnx.com QNX Software Systems Ltd (Canada). For when software has to work (as in downtime is measured in lives lost). Has the only commercial OS for PC's other than Microsoft.
www.cadstore.net Australian on-line Cad store. See Demos for free demos and evaluations. See Tailoring AutoCAD evaluations for A2000/i/2 and A2004.
www.envision.net.au Envision Solutions. Sydney based Autodesk Systems Centre.
Look under Support for Useful Links and Tips And Tricks (sections for AutoCad and Inventer). Promoted at Cad Center presentation as the "good oil".
INVENTOR FAQ Links
Sean Dotson's posted list is kept below to as a convenient check against his future INVENTOR FAQ postings. The idea is as his list changes then I am alerted to a need to add (or possibly remove) a link. An (*ok) means the link is represented above in a section.
From S. Dotson' Inventor FAQ which appears periodically in the Autodesk Inventor Disscussion forum and is updated periodically and is found at the top of his Inventor General Support forum at www.sdotson.com/forum
------------------------------------------------------------
Inventor Related Websites and Resources -Discussion Group Dec 2002
updated on *** INVENTOR FAQ: APRIL 21, 2003 ***
further update on 2June03 ..tinyurl.com/7mgm still in and augi added.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Drew Fulford's Inventor FAQ (Over 400 Inventor frequently asked questions)
http://www.mymcad.com (*ok)
Sean Dotson's Inventor Tutorials & More (plus Inventor Benchmark Results & Software)
http://www.sdotson.com (*ok)
Charles Bliss' iParts and iCode Repository
http://www.cbliss.com/inventor (*ok)
Kent Keller's iParts and Code Site
http://www.mymcad.com/KWiK/Mcad.htm (*ok)
Charles Bliss' Inventor Parts.com
http://www.inventorparts.com (*ok)
Patrick de Stobbeleir's Inventor Tool Site
http://hjem.get2net.dk/opad/ (*ok)
Neil Munro's How-To Articles and Tips
http://pointa.autodesk.com/local/enu/portal/inventor/tips/ (*ok. In Customising to check out.)
Ole Germer's Site (Timken bearings, Involute Gears, Roller Chains etc.)
http://www.oocities.org/olegermer/index.html (*ok)
CAD Studio (Czech based but in English)
http://www.cadforum.cz/cadforum_en/default.asp?tab=2&CAD=Inventor (*ok)
Elise Moss' Tips and Tutorials
http://www.mossdesigns.com/ (*ok)
The Netherlands Inventor Forum (mainly in Dutch)
http://www.inventorusers.nl/index.php (all I saw was Dutch -aj)
Lars Jensen's Inventor Site (Danish and English)
http://www.inventordk.dk/ (all I saw was Danish -aj)
Autodesk's Inventor Users Site (iDrop Parts, Articles & Tutorials)
http://tinyurl.com/7mgm (Gives Autodesk Not Found message -aj) *given again in 2June faq update!?*
(Note:www.tinyurl.com is a facinating free service that reduces long urls. Probably used by Dotson)
Autodesk Inventor Graphic Card & Driver Info (## link maybe no good 21 Apr 03)
http://support.autodesk.com/inventor-graphic-cards/ (*??)
Autodesk's Knowledge Base
http://support.autodesk.com/enu/Homepage.asp (*??) *given again in 2June faq update*
AUGI (autodesk Users Group International) Guilds email lists for Inventor (and other product) support. *added in 2 June faq update*
http://www.augi.com/ (*I have gained very little from this site.)
Official Autodesk Inventor Feature Wishlist Submission Link
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/item/0,,1073397-123112,00.html (*??)
Official Autodesk Inventor Product Information Page (links to other pages)
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=2280662 (*??)
Autodesk University 2002 Class Handouts
http://hera.eeginc.com/autodesk/au/session_list.cfm (*added in 2 June faq update*)
Contact: Aussie John wpsmoke@yahoo.co.uk