Inventor 2018 will officially roll out today. Thousands of our users have shared their thoughts with our development team and tried out alphas and betas over the past year in order to make their mark on the Inventor 2018 release – and we can’t thank them enough for the feedback. We’ll be digging into specific enhancements in 2018 over the next few weeks on the Inventor Blog, but in the meantime, I wanted to offer a quick overview of the overall release and some background on the top new features.

With Inventor 2018, we focused on three key areas: Professional-Grade Design, Expanded Interoperability and The Inventor Experience:

Professional-Grade Design

As we all know, design tools can never be fast enough – especially when working with large assemblies and drawings. Building on work we have been implementing over the past few releases, Inventor 2018 delivers significant performance improvements for customers who need to open, update and navigate faster within their Inventor assemblies and drawings. Based on feedback from customers during the alpha and beta testing of Inventor 2018, users are seeing speed improvements from 2X-10X on their designs.

We have also seen customer demand for tighter integration between design and manufacturing, as well an industry push toward Model Based Engineering (MBE). We added an entirely new set of functionality in the 2018 version by including integrated Model Based Definition (MBD) as part of every seat. Tolerance features are automatically recognized using an embedded GD&T engine, which allows designers to create fully constrained models. Users will also be able to leverage MBD data for downstream consumption (tolerance analysis, CMM, CAM, etc.). Finally, Inventor 2018 allows for publishing 3D PDF and STEP AP242 of part files with MBD and 3DA information included.

Expanded Interoperability

Being able to consume, leverage and publish a wide range of 2D and 3D files has become critical for engineers in today’s complex collaborative design environment, which is why Inventor 2018 delivers new capabilities for customers who work with a variety of design data and formats. Inventor customers in the building product space occasionally need to publish Inventor designs as BIM-ready content. Inventor 2018 has streamlined the BIM Content environment with an updated Shrinkwrap command and the ability to directly export Autodesk Revit and IFC formats from within Inventor.

We are taking the first steps in backwards compatibility between software versions with our AnyCAD feature. The 2018 version will allow designers to use AnyCAD workflows to leverage 2018 parts and assemblies into Inventor 2017 designs. This is great for supplier collaboration and organizations with divisions that need to upgrade to the latest version of Inventor before others.

The Inventor Experience

The Inventor team continues to focus on customer feedback and Inventor Ideas forum submissions. Since the release of Inventor 2017, the team has built over 50 Inventor Ideas requests in to the product – and we have no intention of slowing down. Customer-driven enhancements can be seen throughout Inventor 2018, with improved and streamlined core workflows and model interaction that will help users be even more productive.

On behalf of all of us on the Inventor team (developers, QA, user experience, product management, product marketing, etc.) I want to thank everyone who contributed to this release by testing via the Feedback Community, sharing your thoughts, and sending us Inventor Ideas. We hope you love what Inventor 2018 delivers!

Be sure to check out the Autodesk Inventor Blog for a more detailed post on specific Inventor 2018 enhancements and get your Inventor 2018 here.