So producing 2D working drawings in R6 is becoming painful, and I think I need a package more suited to producing multiple drawings with all the ISO/ASME standard symbols etc…
Inventor LT looks promising at the moment, bit more stable and local than Fusion.
Any advice or other packages that would be worth considering at a similar price point, which would take Rhino files and produce 2D drawings?
Thanks,
David
What kinds of parts are you working on? We use a mix of Inventor and Rhino. Most drawings for Rhino parts end up being done in Inventor with Inventor part files that are simply referencing the .step file. Not only is drafting much easier this way, we also get better document control by sticking everything in Vault.
At least suppliers have stopped laughing at our drawings… Depending on the type of products you do, Fusion could be an interesting asset to have around, being a parametric modeler.
Thanks Louis,
Sheet metal components, IM part drawings, sub assembly, general assembly, drawing revisions etc… Wide variety.
I like modelling in Rhino - language of the heart so to speak - and don’t want to start modelling in something else. Encouraging to hear you reference the .3dm and then draft from that. Exactly what I had in mind.
Doing a bespoke/simple drawing in Rhino is OK. But we’ve had a big increase in the number of drawings we need to produce, ISO standards requested etc, which is problematic because Rhino doesn’t have many drafting symbols disappointingly…
Make2D, although greatly improved, output still requires quite of clean up. Layouts mystifies me still…
I did see an article about Zaha Hadid producing 1000’s of 2D drawing details using GH, which sounds great. But I am not sure that is a suitable approach when it comes to parts drawings…
Hoping for a live BOM using Inventor…?
We use layouts but that has issues of its own. The technical view is barely usable and tends to break when using blocks (things disappearing, random lines coming out of the origin, part outlines coming out as hidden lines…).
If you’re doing bent sheet metal parts, hopefully you’re doing something very special because you might be spending a lot of time manually doing flat patterns that account for bend deduction…
It’s not all rainbows and unicorns with mechanical CAD software either. Constraining everything tends to be extremely time consuming, especially when you can get there quickly in Rhino. Also, changes will often end up needing a rework in the parametric tree which negates all the time you spent setting the constraints in the first place… But yes having more info in the model is super handy for a lot of stuff, most of this stuff comes from Vault though. Generating BOMs, being able to know which assemblies use a specific parts, being able to print all the drawings relating to an assembly in about 4 mouse clicks, etc. Rhino is very good at giving you the tools to make awesome geometry, it’s not very good at everything around it.
GH is its own beast and it’s one of the reason we keep Rhino around. What’s in the Zaha Hadid Morpheus case study yes is something like a million unique parts. But you have to keep in mind that its a few dozen types of unique family of parts, the bulk of it is variations within those families. So you spend a lot of time to setup your drawing nice and tidy and then when you feed it all those variations, the drawings mostly come out fine. The other way to deal with these is to make a clean typical drawing and provide tables for all the variations.
For our sheet metal work I don’t unroll the parts, I send a 3D step file and 2D drawing of the final part, and the factory unroll it in-house putting in their own bend factors.
Must be lucky to have a very understanding fabricator…! It’s not ideal really, and in all likelihood I will end up having to do this outside of Rhino too ultimately.
Most of our projects are design-driven, and we are developing new products in very-short time frames. It’s unfortunate that Rhino gets so close to being a true production tool, but falls short in some of these areas. The speed/ease of modelling and flexibility keep me tethered though!
Vault looks awesome, thanks for the heads-up on that. I see straight away where that would fit into our workflow.