Navigating Inside Solid Bodies

The following post is an Autodesk Inventor Tip that shows you how to zoom around inside of your Autodesk Inventor Solid Bodies. I use the technique quite a bit when creating multi-solid bodied layout parts to visually check for interference.

I have always used this technique –zooming inside of models, and assumed everyone else did as well, until a coworker gave it a try –—–and couldn’t do it!

In fact, none of the people I worked with at the time could get it to work! When they tried to zoom into their models, the program would bog down and not let them do so.

For example, this is what I would see if I zoomed into the corner of the Shaker Table tutorial model…

 

Autodesk Inventor Tip showing how to zoom ito the interior of Solid Bodies…the interior of the model, in this case, the tenons meeting at 45° inside of the leg. This is what they would have seen…

Autodesk Inventor Tip - Zooming Around Inside Solid Bodies – image 01 - showing zooming with Ortho View..a very blurry close-up view of the corner of the table.

We checked system specs, program settings, zodiacal signs, and everything else we could think of to no avail, then, one day someone finally figured out the difference. I was the only one that used the Perspective setting! Everyone else used the Ortho view…

Autodesk Inventor set to Ortho View in this Solid Bodies TipWhen they switched to Perspective, they had the same functionality. Give it a try if you are a serial Ortho user.

View Tab > Appearance Panel > Perspective

This technique is especially handy for on-the-fly checking (assuming you have a 3D mouse) of models as you add iLogic code and test it, and can also be used during assembly constraint placement for locating hidden fasteners such as the ones commonly found on KD furniture.

 

Most of the people I have worked with or taught Autodesk Inventor prefer the Ortho setting (which looks so wrong to me I want to barf), and the preference appears to have a correlation with the level of one’s artistic sensibilities. I would be interested in feedback on that –which setting do you use, and do you consider yourself to be artistic?

That’s it for this Tip, hope it helps your productivity a bit.

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