Work with Multiple Components

Sometimes a design requires that you create and manage several different components. For instance, if your design contains 25 bolt/washer/nut combinations, do not manually create each fastener as a separate set of features. Instead, create just a single version of the bolt, nut, and washer, and then replicate that set of components across your design. Inventor Fusion has commands to support the placement and management of components and component instances.

Note: In Inventor Fusion, you can manage all the components in your design in a single Fusion file. Unlike some other CAD products, Fusion does not require the creation of separate files on disk to use components.

Components in Inventor Fusion are organized hierarchically.  That is, each component can have zero or more child components, and those child components can have child components, and so on. 

Every Fusion design has a single root component. The root component has the same name as the document itself, and is the top node in the browser.

A Fusion component can also contain:

• Solid bodies Zero or more solid bodies.
• Surface Bodies Zero or more surface bodies.
• Sketches Zero or more 2D sketches.
• Work Geometry Work planes, work axes, work points.
• Features Features are used to create geometry and group faces.
• Joints Joints position component occurrences relative to other occurrences in a model.

Components and Component Instances

Inventor Fusion supports the reuse of components in your designs. You can use any component but the root component multiple times in your design.  Each version of the component refers to the same component geometry, and is called a component instance. In the browser, each instance is numbered. In the example below, the Slide component is referenced twice.

All instances of the same component share the same geometry, so a change to one applies to all instances of that component.

Related topics:

• Assemble
• Browser commands