When working with large assemblies you will find that you will spend a good chunk of your time waiting. Now time is money and when designing waiting is inevitable but how can we manage this.
The first thing to look at is your hardware specs. It is no use trying to create complex assemblies with an office PC, you need a beast of a machine. The official specifications look a little like the below.
| For Complex Models, Complex Mold Assemblies, and Large Assemblies (typically more than 1,000 parts) | |
|---|---|
| CPU Type | Recommended: 3.30 GHz or greater, 4 or more cores |
| Memory | Recommended: 64 GB RAM or greater |
| Graphics | Recommended: 4 GB GPU with 106 GB/S Bandwidth and DirectX 11 compliantSee the Certified Hardware |
Once you have your hardware in place, you will find that you will still wait when you have large assemblies and this is where you have some tricks up your sleeve to manage that time.
Suppress anything and everything that is not crucial to what you are working with at that time. This helps but what happens when you want to go back to your full model to change those parts that are suppressed or to work on the entire model because you need to see everything?
In 2021 and before you will use the Level of Detail function and in 2022 going forward it will be Model States.
You will notice in the bottom right hand corner a counter with 2 numbers. The number on the left is the total amount of parts in the top assembly and the number on the right is the total number of unique parts. The lower this number the quicker your waiting times will be.
Solve sick constraints. This is important as the waiting time largely consists of Inventor trying to calculate constraints and what works together and what does not. You might think that it will take longer to fix all the constraints than working with sick constraints but that simply is not true. Take those 10 – 15 minutes to sort out your constraints and Inventor will purr like a kitten.
Do not place thousands of individual parts into your assembly. Create those sub assemblies and you will notice a very big difference in calculation times.
These are just a few suggestions but what I believe is the most important tools for you when working with large assemblies in Inventor.
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