Starting October 30th, 2015, Autodesk Subscription customers will be first in line to access a new Autodesk Inventor release that significantly improves the ways they can innovate, collaborate, and engineer to make great products. A number of the new capabilities build upon the already substantial upgrades that were released earlier this year in Autodesk Inventor 2016.
For starters, a new feature called Shape Generator is now integrated directly into Inventor — no additional products or services required. Start by defining some basics about what your design needs to do – what loads it carries and how it’s supported – and Inventor can now suggest a design strategy for an optimized part. Need a chair that can support a 500 pound load, but is light enough to easily carry around? This new functionality allows users to enter those conditions and Inventor will then generate a suggested lightweight structure.
Meanwhile, ForceEffect Design brings the power of ForceEffect directly inside Inventor, helping study static loading and kinematics in the context of your design. The ForceEffect iOS and Android apps introduced a fast, intuitive way for engineers to create free body diagrams for their mechanical models and have been downloaded by over 1 million people. Now those same capabilities are extended to Inventor, and there’s no more guessing when it’s time to establish loads for simulation — users can set up a quick free body diagram and link it to the sketches that drive their 3d models.
Users who work with Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design engineers — or who need to design their product with the PCB in mind — will also appreciate Inventor’s new electromechanical design functionality. Intermediate Data Format (IDF) import options make it easy to sync up the PCB with the mechanical drawings, and to match IDF data with 3D component libraries as soon as they are imported.
Since collaboration in today’s work environments rarely involves just one software tool, Inventor helps keeps data associative, no matter which CAD package it comes from. Have a file from another CAD system? No problem. Simply reference the file in the Inventor assembly and start designing – no translation, no geometry repair, no re-linking files.
“We’ve designed Inventor 2016 to be the center of an open and connected product development ecosystem that brings together data, people, and processes,” said Lance Grow, director of manufacturing product design at Autodesk. “This is a truly professional-grade solution for everything from design and engineering, to manufacturing and more.”
View additional information about the new version of Inventor here and if you’re not on Autodesk Desktop Subscription yet, learn how to join and be among the first to gain access to the latest capabilities.