When you place a component in an assembly, the cursor is attached to the component center of gravity. It is good practice to ground at least one component to provide an anchor for other components. Grounding removes all degrees of freedom. To ground a component with its origin coincident with the assembly coordinate origin, right-click a component and select Place Grounded at Origin during placement. Additional components are positioned with the cursor attached to the component center of gravity using the saved home view.
Right-click before you place a component to reorient in 90 degree increments about the X, Y, or Z axis and then click in the graphics window to place. You can use Copy and Paste to place new instances using the same orientation. You can also set Inventor to place new instances of components using the orientation of the last placed instance of the component in the browser. In the Application Options dialog box, Assembly tab, enable “Use last occurrence orientation for component placement.” If there are multiple occurrences and the last placed instance is deleted, Inventor uses the orientation of the last previously placed instance.
- On the ribbon, click
Assemble tab
Component panel
Place
to choose a component to place. - In the Place Component dialog box, browse to the folder that contains the component, and then select the component. If you have Vault installed and are placing a file in the vault, you can use an alternate method. Click Open from Vault located under Quick Launch for immediate access to your vaulted files.
- If needed, click Options. In the File Open Options dialog box, select a design view representation, a positional representation, or both, and then click OK.
Select either Interactively place with iMates or Automatically generate iMates on place to insert components with matching iMates.
- When you click Open the selected component is placed in the graphics window attached to the cursor.
- Right-click before you place a component to adjust the X, Y, Z orientation or to select Place Grounded at Origin.
- Click in the graphics screen to place an occurrence of the component.
- Continue to click and place additional occurrences, as needed.
- When all occurrences are placed, right-click and select OK.