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Ellipsis is the official blog of Autodesk's Technical Evangelist Team. We will discuss all things design and manufacturing related with a focus on industries such as automotive and transportation, consumer products, industrial machinery and building product manufacturing and fabrication. We also have resident experts who will blog about specific product developments in CAD, Simulation, Industrial Design and Data Management.
We look forward to providing you, our user community, with the most relevant and up to date developments in our industry, and hopefully with information that will assist you in doing your job better, faster, and more precisely.
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iMap...
June 27, 2008 11:40 PMby Jay TedeschiI had to think twice before doing a //Labs based post two weeks running, but ultimately this stuff is just way too cool to not bring it to everyone’s attention. Added to Labs inventory a few weeks ago was iMap. iMap provides intuitive, graphical assembly views to help Inventor users understand, visualize and more importantly control important relationships and constraints in Inventor assemblies. This is especially valuable when working with an assembly that was created by another user.
iMap enhances existing Inventor assembly tools by providing innovative new capabilities that help you work with information that has traditionally been thought of as nongraphical.
iMap enables users to:• Identify and edit complex constraint relationships• Repair broken relationships• Create relationships between components without having to select topology• Identify and edit complex skeletal modeling designs• Create export new objects to support skeletal modeling and create relationships
These enhancements make it easier to work with very large assemblies, and help the user to understand the relationships that exist between assembly components. And if you use skeletal modeling techniques in your day to day workflow, you will really appreciate how much easier it is to visualize the assembly hierarchy than with the traditional browser view. Quite simply, iMap is designed to provide a wealth of information not easily found otherwise.Get it nowiMap for Autodesk® Inventor® 2009 is available on Autodesk Labs at:0 Comment | Add CommentIn Ellipsis > Inventor 2008, Tips, Industry News
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UI Technology Preview
June 19, 2008 01:59 PMby Jay TedeschiJust posted on Labs this week… the UI Technology Preview for Autodesk Inventor 2009.
We are proud to unveil the UI Technology Preview for Autodesk® Inventor® 2009, a fresh new look and feel specifically designed to enhance the user experience by improving usability, learnability and realizing productivity gains for our users. Autodesk’s Digital Prototyping solution is underpinned by an unwavering focus on ease-of-use. The UI Technology Preview is the latest in this ongoing effort to give Autodesk Inventor an even greater ease-of-use advantage.
Get it nowThe UI Technology Preview for Autodesk® Inventor® 2009 is available on Autodesk Labs at:0 Comment | Add CommentIn Ellipsis > Inventor 2008, Industry News
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A Moo'ving Experience...
June 12, 2008 02:36 AMby Jay TedeschiWell, here I sit, United flight 1194, Vancouver to San Francisco. We left almost an hour and a half late, but at least we are on our way… someone is going to have to explain to me sometime how Bay Area “low lying cloud cover” or “marine layer” (aka “fog”) can cause such massive delays. I mean, maybe in the days before IFR I can see how that would be a problem, but the lack of visual on final just does not seem like it should add all that much additional time for spacing between flights. In any case…
I am on my way home from attending the ShipConstructor Super User Group meeting in Victoria, BC. As I am not sure of the total number of SC users worldwide in totality, I am not sure what kind of cross section this represents, but the 40 or so who attended most definitely seemed to be the cream of the crop. Hence the prefix of “Super” I suppose…
In any case, as ShipConstructor is an AutoCAD based product, all of these users are familiar with it, so we wanted to show them something really flashy. Fortunately we have just the right products on hand to both support and show a compelling Industrial Design story, that is also quite visually appealing. While a large portion of the SC community do in fact design larger utilitarian vessels, e.g. Ice-Breakers, Ferries, tankers, support vessels, etc. etc., there is a good sized group that does large luxury yachts. This is our sweet spot…
The workflow which was demonstrated centered around the use of AliasStudio/Sketchbook Pro as the conceptual design tool best suited to perform the type of design they require. Reference Manager, new to 2009, was used to show the integration of previously created hull, deck and superstructure model data. A rendering of this data was used as a sketch environment, and background for the proposed new cabin interior. Technical surfaces were then created on the sketches and trimmed to existing cabin geometry.
Next up, we showed how Inventor/Inventor Pro can be used by all ShipConstructor users as a component creation tool. A pump assembly was opened with Inventor, but the motor for the pump was imported from a vendor’s site via STEP. Once imported, Feature Recognition was used to convert some of the base geometry into sketch based parametric features that could be leveraged by the designer.
Justin Pacquin of SSI then gave an excellent presentation showing how Autodesk Vault can be best used by ShipConstructor customers for managing the output sheet sets created to document the design in ShipConstructor. I followed things up with a brief but compelling look at Showcase, and it’s value for both design validation and presentation graphics.
All in all, a very enjoyable presentation, and the users on hand were certainly enthusiastic. A quick drive up to the airport where my fanbase was on hand to see me off… aren’t they cute? There was not a dry eye in the place.
