Issue:
You want to change the precision of the Density (or another field) in the Inventor Material Editor interface.
Causes:
Currently the default display precision of each field in the Material Editor is not user editable.
Solution:
Just because the display is not editable, does not mean that the calculations performed by the software are not accurate.
For reference - Inventor’s Data Precision calculations: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/inventor/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2021/ENU/Inventor-Help/files/GUID-84623939-38A8-49BF-8D97-BB9DA3697056-htm.html
See the steps below for an example of how to test Inventor’s accuracy for yourself:
Steps:
1. Change the Unit precision in the document settings to 6 decimal places (or whatever you prefer, up to 8 decimal places).
2. Update the material library density to 0.123456 (or your preferred value). It will round to 0.123 for this example.
3. Create a 1x1x1 cube.
4. Open the iProperties and select the Physical tab.
5. The Mass does indeed show 0.123456.
So even though the Material Density only displays 3 decimal places, it does calculate out 6, based on the document unit settings.
See below for an illustration of the example above:
Inventor Default Material shown below
Document settings, Linear Dimension Display Precision setting changed to 6 decimal places for the purpose of demonstration. (see below)
Note: The limit on this display is 8 decimal places.
In the document’s material properties, input a density with a 6 decimal place value (show below).
Once you hit “Enter” the value is only displayed to 3 decimal places (shown below).
However, if you check the model’s iProperties, the calculated value displays accurately, based on the precision set in the Document Settings – Units Tab (see below).
As you can see, the originally input precision is retained even though the display in the Material Editor may make it appear otherwise.
Special thanks to Kevin Keene and Chris Williams, who did the testing and confirmation for this article.
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