As many of you are probably aware, AU 2010 is upon us and many of us have been feverishly preparing classes and are looking forward to a great AU 2010. Monday has drawn to a close and many attendees have arrived, registered and will kick off AU 2010 with a bang first thing tomorrow morning.
Yesterday (Monday 11/29/2010) was full of press events and preparing for AU to get in full swing.
We are already seeing great news hitting the airways from the press events. DeelipManezes captured a few videos from the event including an new mobile game that will be released soon for the iPad, iPhone and iTouch. That's right, Autodesk is developing a new game for young Inventors. This app targets high school and college students as a fun way to learn more about physics and mechanical design. Check it out!
I know many of you have an iPhones, iTouch or iPad and are often playing with various applications. As many of you know, Autodesk has several applications from Inventor Mobile Publisher, AutoCAD WS, Fluid FX and SketchBook Mobile but there are other great apps that can be very useful when you are working on your designs. Below are a several that I have used in the past and think are great apps to look at.
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.
The other day New York Times carried a front page story titled "3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution" by Ashlee Vance. Ashlee's visit to the Autodesk Gallery in San Fransisco and interview with Carl earlier this year. There is a brief mention of Autodesk in the final story, but the article is accompanied by a 3 minute online feature video which was primary shot in the Gallery and features interviews with Carl Bass and Brian Pene demoing Autodesk software and explaining the 3D printing process. Its worth a quick read and better yet the video is pretty cool.
A prototype of 3DA is now available for all users in all countries as the Autodesk labs application, 3D Annotation for Inventor.
What can 3DA do?
Some of you are exploring methods to streamline communication between Engineers and Drafters by adding important information ON THE 3D Model. 3D Annotation for Inventor gives you this ability in an Inventor environment!
This 3DA Prototype allows you to create and attach engineering annotations, such as dimensions, a variety of notes, datum identifiers, and feature control frames, (everything an Engineer might care about) to the Inventor model which are then displayed in the 3D graphics window.
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.
For those of you using Inventor 2011, Service Pack 1 was released Friday (Aug. 27). Head over to our Services & Support page to download the Service Pack and read the Readme to see all the issues that have been addressed by this service pack.
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.
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.
Today the labs team announced a new utility that adds Alias Sketching to AutoCAD. You may first wonder what you would do with something like this but take a look at the YouTube videos and I think you will find some interesting things you can do with it. I think it opens up interesting opportunities for using your 3D model and sketching over the top of it.
Head on over to Labs.Autodesk.com to download and play with Alias Sketch for AutoCAD.
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