Material groups |
  
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Material groups |
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Woodwork4Inventor uses Material Group conception for manipulating part materials . It's slightly differs from direct application of the material to the part. The main idea of such conception is that all parts in furniture can be grouped into some groups by material. For example: in the office table model bellow you can group parts into material group of Facade, and into a Body parts material group. If necessary, the second group of Facade, Body, etc. may be entered.
Grouping parts by material
At the beginning, the designer is only concerned how parts are grouped by their colors according to their colors. He is not concerned at this moment with exact material that can be used. Only at manufacturing preparation stage, you need to decide what exact material will be applied to the material group. For example, Facade material group parts will be produced from Oak Cantor R4128, Body - from Bantu R3018W.
Same approach is applied to Edge Banding materials.
Grouping Edges by Edge Band Material
Finally each material group can be associated with different materials. We will name such a set of associated materials Replacement Configuration.
Material Groups |
Configuration 1 |
Configuration 2 |
... |
Configuration n |
Facade Chipboard Group |
Oak Cantor R4128 |
Cherry Portofino R4991C |
... |
Milky Oak R4120W |
Body Chipboard Group |
Bantu R3018W |
Cherry Portofino R4991C |
... |
Zebrano Dark R3025W |
Facade Edge Banding Group 2mm |
Light Montana Oak R4215 |
Walnut Bolognia D8 2 |
... |
Milky Oak D4 2 |
Body Edge Banding Group 2mm |
Wenge D12 2 |
Walnut Bolognia D8 2 |
... |
Zebrano D15 2 |
Body Edge Banding Group 0,45mm |
Wenge D12 045 |
Wenge D8 045 |
... |
Zebrano D15 045 |
Glass Group |
Milk Glass |
Grey Glass |
... |
Grey Glass |
.... |
.... |
.... |
.... |
.... |
Etc. |
Etc. |
Etc. |
Etc. |
Etc. |
In other words, Material Group can be associated with an exact material in various combinations and that combinations is named Replacement Configuration. Woodwork4Inventor allows to create, edit, save and apply Replacement Configuration to any design. In this way the same Autodesk Inventor furniture model can be used for preparing manufacturing information with a different material set. For this purpose you need to apply Replacement Configuration and generate the final BOM. You can find more details about work with Replacement Configuration in topic the Naming replacements configurations.
Such approach has a few benefits:
1.You don't need for a product design definition to have a huge material data base
2.The same product 3D model can be used for production furniture models from different materials.
At the moment Woodwork4Inventor supports the two types of main material groups:
1.Main Materials
2.Edge Band materials
Important! We recommend managing the smallest possible number of material groups. Do not create a new new group if there is not special need to do it. You will be able to assign the final material names by the material renaming mechanism.