The Autodesk® Inventor® 2017: Design Variations and Representations student guide contains topics that teach you how to efficiently create and represent designs based on existing geometry. Using this student guide, you will learn how the iFeature, iPart, and iAssembly tools can be used to leverage existing geometry to quickly and easily create additional or slightly varied geometry, and how iMates can be used to define geometry placement in an assembly.
The remaining chapters in the student guide focus on how you can simplify a model to create positional configurations to evaluate components’ range of motion (Positional Representations), create simplified geometry to share with customers while protecting your intellectual property (Shrinkwrap and Assembly Simplification), and how to manage working with large assemblies (Level of Detail Representations).
The topics covered in this student guide are also covered in the following ASCENT student guides, which include a broader range of advanced topics:

Autodesk® Inventor® 2017: Advanced Assembly Modeling Autodesk® Inventor® 2017: Advanced Part ModelingTopics Covered

Create and place an iFeature. Use the Copy command to duplicate features in a model or between models. Create a table-driven iFeature. Edit an iFeature. Create an iPart that can generate different configurations of a model. Insert standard or custom iParts into an assembly. Replace an iPart in an assembly with a new iPart instance. Modify an iPart factory. Use a table-driven iPart to create an iFeature. Build iMate constraints into parts or subassemblies. Combine multiple iMates into a Composite iMate group. Manually or automatically match iMates of parts in an assembly. Control the order in which iMate pairs are previewed by using the Match List functionality. Vary constraint settings in iParts by including iMates. Create and place an iAssembly. Edit an iAssembly Factory. Create and edit different positional representations of an assembly by overriding the existing settings of an assembly. Create a Shrinkwrap part that is a simplification of the original component. Selectively determine which assembly components to include in a simplified view and use that information to create a new part model. Define bounding box or cylindrical geometry to represent assembly components and use that information to create a new part model. Combine the use of a simplified view, envelopes, and visibility settings to create a new simplified model. Display a system-defined Level of Detail (LOD) Representation. Simplify the display and create user-defined LOD Representations in an assembly. Replace a complex component for a simpler one using a Substitute Level of Detail Representation.

Prerequisites The material covered in this student guide assumes a mastery of Autodesk® Inventor® basics as taught in the Autodesk® Inventor® Introduction to Solid Modeling student guide.