No More Lost in Paper Space
So you’ve made your part and are ready to create a final 2D drawing with multiple views of your part. You’ll want it to contain your title block and border as well as one or more fully dimensioned views. Start by creating a new IDW file. A sheet appears with a default border and title (both of which you can modify to suit your needs). Now we’re ready to create our views!

Base View (A)
Let’s start with the base view. Select the Base View tool from the panel bar. Then select the part or assembly file you want to view, along with the scale factor and orientation. Selections you make in the dialog box appear dynamically in the graphics area. Finish by selecting a point in the graphics area to place your view. Now you’re ready to create some projected views.

Projected Views
Use the Projected View option to create isometric or orthographic views. You can place multiple views at one time. The process is simple: Select Projected View from the panel bar and pick the base view to work from. The direction you move the mouse controls which projected view appears. Horizontal or vertical movement generates orthographic views, and diagonal creates an isometric view. After placing the various views, right-click and select Create from the shortcut menu.

Section Views
Section views can be painful to create in AutoCAD but are generated instantly in Autodesk Inventor. Simply pick Section View from the panel bar, select the view you want to section, and draw the line that defines the plane that cuts through the part or assembly. Then right-click to continue and complete the Section View dialog box. Complete the command by placing the final view.

Even More Views
Autodesk Inventor supports many different view types, from Detail views to Broken views. All are easily found in the Drawing Views panel bar. Note that you don’t need to wait until a part is completed to create your drawing file. Since the Autodesk Inventor files are associative, the drawing file always updates to accommodate the most recent view. Would you like to grab the dimensions you placed while creating your model? Just right-click in the desired view and pick Get Model Annotations. To add dimensions, right-click in the panel bar to switch to the Drawing Annotations panel bar. Here you’ll find the wonderful General Dimension tool we used in Step 5, along with several other dimensioning tools.

Are you worried about layers, text styles, dimension styles, and so forth? No worries—you can duplicate all your familiar AutoCAD settings in the Standards dialog box. There are many drafting standards available for you to use (ANSI, ISO, JIS, and so on), or you can create your own. If you aren’t ready to make that jump to 3D, try creating your 2D drawing in the Autodesk Inventor drawing file. The added intelligence of the Autodesk Inventor parametric-based modeler takes you further and faster than AutoCAD. You can still set up constraints between the views so that if you change the hole in one view, it updates in the corresponding views. It’s amazing!

Comparing the IDW to working with AutoCAD paper space layouts doesn’t even begin to do it justice. The IDW is exponentially more intelligent, eliminating so much of the tedium we face with paper space layouts.

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