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CADgneto is a new blog for Autodesk mechanical products, with an emphasis on AutoCAD Electrical.
CADgneto is maintained by Steve McCarthy, an Applicaitons Specialist (and coworker) with SolidCAD.
Steve brings a wealth of experience with AutoCAD Electrical to SolidCAD customers and is using his blog to share that information with you.
The "Analyze Interference" command in Autodesk Inventor (Tools > Analyze Inteference) is a useful command but can be especially useful with the following tip:
When you perform an interference analysis, the command requires you to define 2 selection sets. Every component is selection set 1 is checked against every component in selection set 2. However, the command will NOT detect any interference between components in the SAME set.
To workaround this, only define a single set (put every component into selection set 1) and when you click "OK" the command will check for interference between every component.
In 2005, The Autodesk Informer will continue to be a source of product and industry news as well as provide a collection of useful tips and tricks.
For a laugh, check this out - evidence on the existence of Santa Claus for the scientifically-minded: http://www.physlink.com/Fun/IsThereSanta.cfm
With the introduction of layers into Autodesk Inventor 9, one common scenario is to move an entire part, or collection of parts onto different layers within an IDW. By following the steps here, this is an easy process:
Any 3D graphics artist will tell you that you NEVER render direct to video; instead, ALWAYS render to sequential still images instead. There are numerous reasons for this:
When you render to sequential still images, 3D Studio MAX will name each frame by appending the frame number to the end of the filename. This will give you the following filenames as an example:
teapot_100.jpg, teapot_101.jpg, teapot_102.jpg ..... teapot_xxxx.jpg where each frame of the animation is a seperate file.
Now that you have these series of still images, the question becomes "how do I stitch them together into a single animation?" For that, I use a GREAT piece of free software called Rad Video Tools.
From within Rad Video Tools, simply select the first still image in the series and click the button labelled "Convert a file".
Rad Video Tools will present a dialog box asking if you would like to treat the series of images as a single animation since it will automatically detect that there are multiple images with the same name; say "yes" to this prompt. After this, you will be presented with a new dialog box from which you can specify the filename of the video including a multitude of output settings (frame rate, scaling, etc.) and then hit the "Convert" button to produce an AVI file of your video.
Not only do the Rad Video Tools have a multitude of options for creating your video file, but you can also do batch conversion, convert video files back into a series of still images (the reverse of this tutorial) and a number of other things.
One other aspect of the Rad Video Tools that is really useful is the ability to create an EXE file of your video. This guarantees that your video will playback on any Microsoft Windows machine since both your video and the player are embedded into a single executable file. To do this, you need to encode your video using the Bink codec (a proprietary codec developed by the creators of Rad Video Tools) which you can do by choosing the "Bink it" button, rather than the "Convert a file" option mentioned previously. After creating the Bink video, you can select it from in the application and choose "Advanced Play" from which you can create an EXE file.
*Click the screenshot images to see a larger version*
Autodesk Inventor lists assembly-level constraints under component occurences in the browser. However, if you have a problem with an assembly constraint, this can make it difficult to locate the troublesome constraint as you need to expand each component in the browser to see it's associated assembly constraints. As a handy tip, when your in the assembly, use the dropdown arrow indicated in the image to change Inventor into "Modeling view". This will cause all the assembly constraints at that level of the assembly to exist in one folder labelled "Constraints". Now you can quickly scan the folder for any constraints that require your attention. Once done, simply change the dropdown back to "Assembly view". For example, looking at the image I can easily identify "Mate:18" and "Mate:21" as constraints in need of fixing.
The "Place Component" command in Autodesk Inventor only allows you to place a single component at a time. Therefore, it can be a tedious and time-consuming operation when you have multiple components to insert. As a workaround, launch Windows Explorer but adjust it so that you can see your assembly window in the background.
Navigate in Windows Explorer to a 
folder within your project and select the components that you would like to place using the CTRL and SHIFT keys. With the components selected, click and drag from Windows Explorer into the assembly window which should be partially visible in the background.
Click on the image to see a larger popup window showing this process.
Note: Since the first component in every assembly becomes the grounded component, I will typically insert this first component using the traditional "Place Component" command and then use the method above to quickly place the remaining components.
This month, Autodesk has been running technical webcasts for Autodesk Revit.
This is a great opportunity to not only see Autodesk Revit software but also understand more about "Building Information Modeling - BIM").
You must register to attend the live webcasts.
Previous webcasts in this series have been archived and are available for immediate viewing.
3D Studio MAX 7 (3ds max 7) trial is now available for download.
Discreet started shipping 3D Studio MAX R7 to customers today (October 13, 2004).
For product information go here.
Download 3ds max 7 technical specification document.
Read the press release here.
Autodesk is looking for users of 
Autodesk Inventor to help prioritize the Autodesk Inventor Wishlist:
"The Inventor Product Management team wants to capture your input and prioritize the Inventor Top 10 Wish List. This list was originally defined by your input during the Inventor 8 timeframe. Your answers will be used to help prioritize functionality in future versions of Inventor."
When entering values into dialog boxes in 3D Studio (Autodesk VIZ, 3ds max), if you enter 
the value with the letter "r" preceeding the number, that value will get interpreted as being a relative amount.
For example: Suppose that you previously extruded a wall 8'. Now the design requirement is that the wall must be 8'6". Rather than having to type 8'6" in the dialog, simply type "r6"" (without the outer quotes) and the wall will now be the desired height.
Note that it does not matter whether the letter "r" is lower or upper-case.
In AutoCAD 2005 type “XREFTYPE”. This system variable controls the choice of either Attachment or Overlay in the Xref Manager when attaching a drawing. By default, XREFTYPE is set to 0 (Attachment), set the variable to 1 (Overlay) and when the user goes to attach the Xref, OVERLAY is the default choice in the dialog box instead of attachment.
Thanks to Michael Rotolo for submitting this tip.
Autodesk has just posted 4 new demonstration videos for Autodesk Vault. These show specific functionality available within Autodesk Vault.
The new videos can be viewed here. Not that in addition to these new function-specific videos there is also an overview video for Autodesk Vault.
I HAVE NO MORE INVITES AVAILABLE
As a subscriber to Google's Gmail service, I have 5 invites available. Gmail is Google's new email service which at this point is only available to people who have been invited. 
In the near future, Google will be making the service available publicly but by signing up now, you can ensure that you get the email address you want.
So if you want Gmail, add a comment to this post and in it include your first name, last name and current email address.
Most users are aware that AutoCAD uses "Support Paths" which identify the locations where both dependent AutoCAD files and any custom files (ie. lisp addons) reside. Since AutoCAD defines multiple support paths and the fact that you can include your own additional paths, locating a file within one of these locations can be a tedious process; especially since later versions of AutoCAD point to locations outside of the installation directory.
That being said, using a single line of lisp code at the command line in AutoCAD makes locating these files a breeze. In lisp, the FINDFILE function searches all of your support paths for the file that you specify. Therefore, as an example, if we wanted to search for the "ACAD.PAT" file within the support paths we would simply enter the following at the AutoCAD command prompt and hit enter:
(findfile "acad.pat")
Looking at the image we can see the exact path to this file (click on image to see it enlarged).
So you've designed a part in Autodesk Inventor and now you would like to create a mirror of it so that you have both a left and right-hand version of the part file. Fortunately, in Autodesk Inventor this is a very easy process. In order to accomplish this task, we need to make use of Inventor's "derived component" functionality.
A derived component creates a part file that is based upon another file. Essentially, the source file is referenced (linked) into the new component, thereby creating a derived part. Because there is referencing between the files, a change made to the source file will propagate through to the derived part. The nice thing here is that after you have created your mirrored part, should you need to go back and change the source file, those changes will appear in the mirrored version either by re-opening it or clicking the "update" button.
Assuming that you've already created the source file, here is the process to create a mirrored version:
1) Begin a new part file
2) Finish the sketch
3) From the "Part Features" commands, choose "Derived Component", the "Open" dialog will appear
4) In the dialog, browse to the source file and click "Open" (ensure that the source file is contained within the project file as you are referencing between files)
5) In the "Derived Part" dialog that appears (see image below), click the toggle for "Mirror" and then say "Ok"
6) At this point you can add any additional features to the mirrored version that do not appear in the source file (note: changes made to the source file will appear in the derived part; however, any changes made to the derived part will not affect the source file)
7) Save the mirrored part
Closing thoughts: Derived parts are very powerful and in future installments we'll talk about some of their additional uses.
Discreet has announced the upcoming version of 3D Studio MAX (R7) and product literature is available on discreet's website.
From a design visualization perspective, the following features are of note:
3D Studio MAX and Autodesk VIZ allow for the creation of a default template file named "maxstart.max" or "vizstart.max" depending on what product you are using. This defines the default settings used for new files created either when the application starts or when a new scene is begun using File > Reset.
From the help file for 3ds max:
maxstart.max − At startup and when you reset, 3ds max looks for this file in the Scenes directory specified in Configure Paths, and if found, loads it. This allows you to specify the default state of the workspace whenever you start or reset the program.
Note: In the above paragraph, the default template file should be called "vizstart.max" if you are using Autodesk VIZ.
Personally, I customize this file so that I have a 4-view layout but with the views defined orthographically. With this configuration, the upper-left view is "TOP", lower-left is "FRONT", lower-right is "RIGHT" and upper-right is "PERSPECTIVE" as indicated by the image.
Autodesk has begun shipping Autodesk Inventor Series 9 to customers. Users on the Subscription program are already receiving their copies.
Click here for more information on Autodesk Inventor Series 9.
Autodesk Inventor Series 9 also includes Autodesk Vault 3 for integrated data management.
The Properties Manager command is the most versatile command for modifying object properties. However, in my experience, many users aren't aware that you can access sub-selections within this command to limit the objects that you want to modify. When you make a selection within the properties manager and that selection is made up of different types of geometry, the selection dropdown will indicate the word "All (#)". This is an indicator that your selected objects are not all the same type (for example: you may have a selection made up of lines, dimensions, arcs and blocks). By clicking the down button at the right of the dropdown, you can access a subset of this overall selection.
An example of where this can be very useful is changing the properties of a schedule or parts list. Simply make a selection of the entire schedule or parts list and at the "All" level, change the properties common to all objects. Then click the dropdown and access the "Text" objects to change properties specific to the text objects and repeat for the linework by accessing the "Line" objects.