In the Machine

Inventor 2012 is here!

We have been slaving away at our little cottage this past year to bring you all new software. What awaits you in the next release of Inventor? Check out several interviews Mr. Cohee conducted concerning our 2012 lineup.

  

 

CAP IT!!

 Have you ever created a Parts List only to realize a great deal of the text is lower case? If this has happened to you, you know just how painful it is to go through and capitalize everything.

 
 
There is a much easier way to do this in the the last few releases of Inventor. To do it, open up the assembly and open up the assembly BOM. From there you can select everything you want to capitalize and right click to capitalize.

 

Now go back to the drawing and you will see it is all capitalized.

Hope that saves you some time the next time somebody forgets to select the caps lock button before they type.  

2011 Subscription Advantage Packs are here

Today  we released Subscription Advantage Packs for many of the Autodesk products.

If you have subscription for any of these products, head on over the the Subscription site to download the desired Advantage Pack.

With the addition of the Inventor 2011 Subscription Advantage Pack, those of you on subscription will receive enhancements around ease-of-use tools, better data interoperability, expanded tools for building product fabricators, and an expanded tooling library.

Ease of Use

• Dynamic Sectioning – Appearing as a top AUGI request, many of you have requested the ability to dynamically drag a section plane through models to better see internal detail.
• Feature auto-name – By providing better naming of features in the browser, you can select and modify their designs easier.
• Flexible drawing view orientation – You can now modify drawing views after they have been placed without the need to delete and re-creating the drawing view.

BIM Tools

If you design HVAC components and need to streamline AEC Exchange, now you can automate the creation of BIM content through the new AEC Exchange API. The Inventor 2011 Subscription Advantage Pack includes a  rich API framework for AEC Exchange allowing the ability to build your own applications which can automate various tasks inside AEC Exchange.

Better Interoperability

With the Subscription Advantage Pack you will gain enhanced support for Rhino translators, 3D DWG™ in/out, iLogic Copy Design. This makes it much easier to open and save 3D DWG files as well as import Rhino files directly into Inventor. For those of you using iLogic, you will be able to copy your iLogic models  as well as remove rules when passing sensitive data to your vendors. 

Inventor Tooling Expanded Content

Gain access to more mold bases and components for AutoCAD Inventor Tooling Suite and AutoCAD Inventor Professional Suite software

•  Additional inch/imperial mold bases and components from popular vendors
•  Expanded coverage of Meusburger mold bases and components

You know what they say...a picture is worth 1000 words.

 
 

 

New Review of Inventor 2011

As most of you know, Inventor 2011 has been out for since March of this year and many of you are already using. I still get questions from some of you that are thinking of upgrading and haven't done so yet so vor various reasons. David Cohn wrote a great review on Desktop Engineering that I think is well worth reading - even if you are already using Inventor 2011.

Scale up those constraints

There are a few things options I typically change after installing a fresh new Inventor. I don't feel old enough to need to scale up my text and constraints but I like the look when they are larger. If you take a look at the following image this is the typical size of both text and constraints.

There are two separate options to scale them both up. Launch Applications Options from the ribbon and select the Sketch tab. From there we will first scale up the Constraints so bump up the value from 1 to 1.5 or 2.

The second area we will adjust is under the General Tab. Look for the Annotation Scale option on the right and change it from 1 to 1.5 or 2.

 

Simply apply and close the dialog to view you sketch annotations and constrains with the new setting.

Enjoy!

More great videos

Those of you that have followed me for for a while know I am a sucker for cool videos created with Inventor. More and more Inventor videos are getting posted on YouTube and other services with great tips and tricks  and other videos that just look cool. Over the weekend I ran across these two videos what were captured with Inventor 2011 with real-time graphics that I thought were worth mentioning - take a look.

A Brief Overview with Wiki help

A few weeks ago I posted about our new Wiki help system and now there is a great YouTube video from Lynn Allen on how to use it. This shows you how to use it and how you can set your own page up to share your own pictures, videos and tips.

 If any of you set up a page page with tips and images let me know. You never know, it might even show up on my blog.

For starters here are a few pages to check out.

• Paul Normand'sWiki page is full of great Tips, Tricks and cool links from Paul.
• Bill Bogan's page with useful tips and projects he has worked on.
• Inventor Studio Tips

Just rewind it

Today I was flipping through a training manual for Inventor 2010 and noticed a feature I had forgotten about and had to play with it. While in a model and navigating around, Inventor keeps track of all your moves and gives you a chance to rewind and fast forward through your movements.

To access this capability, select the Navigation Wheel from the View tab in the ribbon or from the view tool on the right side of the graphics window.

 

Select the Rewind option to access the various views by scrubbing the cursor across the various views to rewind or fast forward your view.

 

Inventor Wiki - add your tutorial here

Along with all of the other great news you are hearing around Inventor 2011, several of our manufacturing products are now included in the new Autodesk Wiki Help Beta. What does this mean? It means that you can now add your own information for all the world to see (or at least other Inventor users).

 

This is also Google/Bing search able so head on over to your favorite search engine to help locate items from the help system. One note - since this a new system, many of the Wiki results are lower in the page until people use it a little more. 

Also one really cool item on the Inventor Wiki site is a new video added to help you learn about the new Direct Manipulation capabilities for Inventor 2011.

Head on over and check it out!!!

Inventor 2011 is here!!!

That's right, today Autodesk is launching our 2011 design software products including Autodesk Inventor, AutoCAD, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk 3ds Max and more.

So whats new you ask? Well here are just a few of the new enhancements in Inventor 2011.

Dramatic Ease of Use Improvements

• Direct Manipulation with real-time previews
• Dynamic Input for Sketching
• New Assemble Tool

 

Design Automation / Design Efficiency

• Integration of iLogic
• Interoperable with Inventor Fusion
• Many new drawing enhancements

Enhanced Visualization

• Realistic rendering in the modeling environment
• New display modes
• Consistent materials when sharing models with Showcase, AutoCAD, Revit and 3ds Max 

There is a whole lot more than this in Autodesk Inventor 2011 to take a look at the following PDF for a deeper dive.

Enjoy!