Hold that Pose! - Extracting Camera Views in Autodesk Inventor Publisher

“There are no circumstances, however unfortunate, that clever people do not extract some advantage from.”
François de la Rochefoucauld

This week I've been spending a lot of time working on one of two things.  The Autodesk Manufacturing Academy, and Autodesk Inventor Publisher.  During that time, I've learned a few tricks that can made the job go  along smoothly.

One of the challenges I encountered was working with the storyboard.  As I was moving from step to step, creating assembly (or disassembly) steps, I encountered an issue where I wanted to move a component.  That part was easy.

The hard part was that in order to select the component I wanted, I needed to zoom into to the assembly.  But the snapshot remembers that I did that, and creates a rotation I don't want.

So how do I get back to my original view?  I could try to "eyeball" it, and try to match it up, but that would be tedious, and I would probably never be exactly right.

Fortunately, a tool called "Extract Camera" helps with that.  By using this tool, we can extract a camera view from one snapshot, and place it on the current camera.

Right click on a snapshot and choose "Extract Camera"

It's great when you need to rotate your view to see something, then match it up to another snapshot.

It wouldn't be a blog post without a video, so hears the video to go with the post!