An Autodesk Inventor iCopy Tutorial
It all started with a Direct Message from @JohnEvansDesign (the AUGIworld content manager for Inventor) on Twitter.
‘I need some help – Can you write 2000 words on any Inventor Topic by the end of the week?’
‘Hmm’ I thought, I could do something on iCopy – I haven’t seen very much around on that…
3500 words and four days later – still with lots to say – I was beginning to think that I had bitten off more than I could chew!
Finally, with some sound editing advice from John, my first ever article for AUGI was born…
An iCopy “How To” – For AUGIworld
iCopy is a tool within Inventor that allows you to create multiple copies of an Asssembly, whilst automatically sizing them to suit a ‘Skelton’ part.
iCopy was introduced in Inventor 2010 as a plugin via Autodesk Labs and from 2011 iCopy is included in the Box.
iCopy brings together adaptivity and skeletal modelling and whilst it might seem like a lot of steps to create your iCopy template file, in fact it only took me about 20min to create the data set for this tutorial.
If you would like to find out more about iCopy – please check out the article in the September 2011 edition of AUGIworld.
You can also read it in the AUGI Library – ‘AUGI An iCopy how to’
Please feel free to download the full, unabridged version here:
Here is the data set that goes with the article:
Download “AUGIworld iCopy Tutorial Dataset” AUGI-iCopy.zip – Downloaded 2263 times – 25 MB
Sorry I forgot – i’m using Inventor 2011 Professional.
Don’t be sorry ;)
Hello Paul,
thank you for your great tutorial.
I managed to set up an iCopy template Assembly. But if try to place this with icopy into a Host Assembly, the Master Sketch is placed right on your wave form skeleton, but the part in the iCopy template is somewhere but not fitted to the wave. And, I expected that it has to be grounded automatically(?) but it isn’t – i can move it around.
Making the part adaptive in teh template doesn’t help.
Any suggestions?
Thank you in advance!
Greetings,
Helmut
Hi Helmut,
Check to see that your master sketch is anchored with a ‘Fixed’ constraint in at least one spot. Now check to make sure that your master part is constrained and grounded in your iCopy template assembly.
Let me know if that helps!
Cheers,
Paul.
Hí Paul
I made the icopy tutorial and i can draw ‘I Mastered iCopy’with the AUGI button.
I use it for ceiling panels.
But what i can’t figure out is that i want the lenght and width of my panel in the BOM.
I can’t use dimensions in the sketch so how can i get these parameters in my part so i can use them in the BOM?
Kind Regards Jos
Lol! I’m glad you enjoyed my sense of humour Jos ;)
To extract the panel length and width, add reference parameters in the part files you created with the ‘Make Part’ tool, for the template iCopy assembly.
Check that these are working in the template iCopy assemblies BOM before you start using the iCopy tools.
I hope that this helps.
Paul