Inventor Bootcamp

Well, we just got back from the Big D - Dallas, Texas. Inventor Bootcamp was held in dallas last week, and despite the fact that it was grueling, there was also time for some fun.

The underlying story, if you were listening closely, was interoperability. Pay attention, you will hear more and more about interoperability in the near future. Of course, we all know about bringing AutoCAD data into the Inventor environment, and we know that in 2008 they offered us the DWG file format as an option for creating drawings. But what I think we are going to hear more of is other Autodesk products interacting with Inventor, and Inventor interacting with other products. Putting your Inventor models into Revit, etc.

Stay tuned.

Inventor 2009 Part II

Let's start at the beginning. Sketches. Some very nice features were added to the sketch environment, and I will get to part of them here.

Degrees of Freedom; you can highlight a sketch, then right-click and select Degrees of Freedom.

The red (in this color scheme) arrows indicate that you can move the item (in this case, lines and vertices) in the direction(s) indicated. And, of course you will have curved arrows for angles, etc.

Thumbs Up; Just a nice little touch to make it easier to understand how to completely constrain a sketch.

Inventor User Survey

I am in the process of creating a very detailed survey, delivered in parts, relating to the usage of Inventor. This is strictly for U.S. CAD and it's designed to help us deliver bettter training, better blogs, etc.

So my question is do you think this is a good idea? Let me know - tod.wallace@uscad.com

Inventor 2009

So far I have only had a chance to take Inventor on a short trip around the harbor, and here are some personal observations.

I really like the new release, the people at Autodesk have done a good job (all-in-all), providing something for everyone. And I do mean everyone, there are things in there for the new user, to help them create better sketches, and things for the verterans and power users.

THUMBS (HOOKS) DOWN: the steering wheel has been implemented into Inventor. Some of you may be familiar with the 'steering wheel' from Design Review. But, to me, that little thing following you around, even in 'reduced footprint' mode is enough to make even the heartiest of souls paranoid.

THUMBS UP: here are couple of initial impressions. And more to come. First up; the ViewCube, a nice subtle addition to the interface. The ViewCube lets you pick a face, a corner, an edge, and your model re-orients based on your selection on the ViewCube. You can drag on the ViewCube and the model will re-orient (almost like orbit). You can right-click on the ViewCube (remember: right-click on everything) and a pop-up menu will appear, allowing you to create a new home view, a new front view, or change from orthographic to perspective. Next, and there will be more on this later, one of my real favorites, the ability to publish to the Frame Generator, and the bonus is that it can be done very easily.

More Soon !!!