Improving Inventor Assembly Performance with Levels of Detail

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Autodesk Inventor Tips & Tricks

Improving Inventor Assembly Performance with Levels of Detail

By John Koop, Inventor Specialist, TEDCF Publishing

I try to spend time each day perusing Inventor and other CAD forums and lately I’ve noticed several posts referring to "sluggish" assemblies. When assemblies become large, they tend to slow down a bit. Adding more RAM or upgrading your computer always helps, but how can you improve the performance of assemblies without shelling out more money?

There are several ways to improve the performance of assemblies, but the one that stands out is Levels of Detail which reduces the overhead of assembly components and subassemblies. This, in turn, speeds up the functionality of Inventor assemblies.

The Basics

Inventor has four predefined Levels of Detail: Master, All Components Suppressed, All Parts Suppressed, and All Content Center Suppressed.

The Master LOD contains the entire assembly with nothing suppressed.

The All Components Suppressed LOD suppresses all the components in the assembly. Components can then be unsuppressed as needed.

The All Parts Suppressed LOD suppresses all the parts but does not suppress sub-assemblies. This way, the structure of the assembly is still available for study.

The All Content Center LOD suppresses all components used from the Content Center.

Custom Levels of Detail

In addition to the four predefined Levels of Detail, you can also customize your own. Here's how:

Expand Representations at the top of the Assembly Tree. Right click Level of Detail, and select New Level of Detail.
The next step is to right click and select Suppress on all the components you wish to suppress.
Now save the file. The file must be saved while your custom LOD is active.

As you can see from the above picture, I have added five custom LODs to my Tube and Pipe Routed System. This makes moving between the different aspects of my assembly much easier and faster.

Quickly Create Levels of Detail

There is also a faster way to set-up a Level of Detail. While in the Master LOD, choose the components to Suppress and then click Save. Inventor will ask you if you wish to save the suppressed components to a new LOD. If this is what you want, enter the name of the new LOD and click Yes. If this is not what you want, click No and Inventor will save the Master LOD without the components being suppressed.

Using LODs is helpful when working in large assemblies. It's easier to navigate through your assembly and makes loading times much quicker.

This is especially true when closing a very large assembly with the All Components Suppressed LOD active. Loading time will be much faster when re-opening the file later.

Why is this Important?

Assembly files can get very large and it is important to deal with them carefully in order to keep your computer from getting clogged up and slowing down. Using Levels of Detail is a quick and easy way to keep your Inventor files from getting “sluggish.

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