Presentation files – creating exploded views and animations of assemblies

Engineers and designers must frequently produce exploded views of products or assemblies to communicate design intent. Often, it is a requirement to produce an animation of this. Inventor has specific tools and file formats to enable the efficient creation of such animations. These are known as presentations.

Presentations (.ipn files) can be created from any assembly with two or more parts contained within it. In this recipe, you will create a presentation file of a toy figure, showing all its parts exploding outward. The result will be exported as a .avi video. The recipe will also show how you can use snapshot views within the Presentation environment to create an exploded view for a drawing file.

Getting ready

To begin this recipe, we will have to create a new .ipn file and then import LMan.iam into the presentation file. Once this is complete, we can start the process of creating an exploded...