Autodesk Inventor What’s New 2022: Drawing Automation

Some tasks are difficult and interesting, some tasks are simple and boring, but the worst tasks are difficult and boring!

Difficult and interesting is where technical people live. We love problem solving and find it easy to focus when we have a tricky problem to solve.

Happily, many simple jobs have been easily automated by our everyday software (who remembers running tracings down to the print shop to collect dyelines… mmm, the smell of ammonia!)

Difficult means that we need to focus. Boring means that focusing is hard. It’s the difficult but repetitive tasks that are most ripe for automation.

Click here to find out what else is new in Autodesk Inventor 2022.

Drawing Automation in Inventor 2022

Autodesk Inventor 2022 includes two new settings for drawing automation, which can help you get the best of sheet formats to automate drawing creation.

New in 2022 is the ability to link a model view to a drawing view, including your 3D annotations.

This allows the automation of drawing view creation and annotation when creating a drawing using an Inventor Sheet format.

Creating a drawing from a sheet format

Here’s how it works.

1. Create a new drawing, using a sheet format from your template.
2. The views of your model are automatically placed on the sheet, and 3D annotations from the model are automatically converted to 2D annotations in the drawing.
3. Tidy up your layout, fill out the title block – and BAM! Drawing complete 😉

Getting set up

To automatically create a drawing from a sheet format, you’ll need to get set up.

First you need to standardise the names of the views that you’d like to ‘pair up’ between the model and the drawing… for example ‘FRONT’, ‘SIDE’ and ‘TOP’.

Tip: It would be a good idea to add these views to your part and assembly model templates.

Add your standardised views to an existing model that you will use to set up your template.

In your drawing template, create a temporary drawing of your existing model. Make sure that you name each Drawing view consistently with your Model views.

RMB click on each drawing view and click ‘edit’. In the ‘Drawing view’ dialog, in the ‘Component’ tab, Choose the corresponding model view from the ‘Design view’ drop down.

Now click on the cog wheel ‘Settings’ button, which is next to the design view drop down.

In the ‘View representation options’ dialog, check the boxes for ‘Camera View’ and ‘Include 3D Annotations’.

Click OK and OK again to close the dialogs.

Now save your sheet layout as a Sheet format. Click on this link to learn how to create sheet formats.

You are all set up and ready to test out your Sheet format template.

When you’ve completed the modelling process, add your 3D annotations and/or GD&T and make sure that the correct annotations are visible in each view.

Pick your sheet format from your template using the ‘New Drawing’ dialog, file menu or Quick access tool bar and watch the magic happen!

Drawing automation – Q&A

If you are testing this workflow and need help, please click here to post your question on the Autodesk Inventor forum.

If you have suggestions on how to improve drawing automation in Autodesk Inventor, click here to post your suggestion on Inventor ideas.

If you would like to test new functionality inside Inventor, before it is released to the general public, click here to join the Autodesk Feedback community.