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In The Machine is the official blog of the Inventor Product Management Team. It is a way for us to share Inventor news, interesting information about successful Inventor customers and partners as well as tips and tricks. From time to time we’ll also use the blog to solicit feedback from users via surveys. This blog is hosted by Garin Gardiner our Technical Marketing Manager.
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Official Autodesk Inventor Podcast Episode 32 is available
February 27, 2009 02:51 PMby Garin Gardiner
For Podcast 32 I had a great question from one of our long time Inventor customers (Bob from Belco Packaging) concerning adding constraints to rollers and a curved sheet metal frame. I have had similar questions in the past and there are a few tips that make this fairly easy to do. Take a look at the latest podcast for some tips on adding work geometry to curved holes as well as adding iMates to speed up the process of adding many components.
If you have a good idea for a podcast feel free to send it my way. You never know, it might just show up here one day. Thanks for Bob the great tip!Don't forget to head over to iTunes if you want to subscribe and download these automatically when a new episode is available.
Zune
Don't forget to leave feedback by adding a comment to this post or email me.6 Comments | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Podcast, Autodesk Inventor, Tips
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The Inventor family is bigger and better than ever
February 25, 2009 01:15 AMby Garin Gardiner
Hot off the press!The Autodesk® Inventor® 2010 software product line offers many significant usability and productivity enhancements that will benefit users who need to create, optimize, and validate designs involving plastic parts, sheet metal parts, and large assemblies. The major areas of focus in Inventor 2010 are:- Plastic Part Design
- Simulation and Layout Design
- Interoperability and Data Exchange
- Usability and Productivity
Not only have we added new functionality to Inventor, we’re adding new products to the family that extend the reach of Digital Prototyping to address the needs to more in the manufacturing sector.
The AutoCAD Inventor Professional Suite includes the new Autodesk Inventor Tooling software to streamline the design of injection molds for plastic parts. This new application will enable you to quickly create and validate complete mold designs, reducing errors and improving mold performance.
Also brand new in the 2010 lineup is the AutoCAD® Inventor LT™ Suite. By combining the part-level 3D power of Autodesk Inventor LT with the world-leading 2D drafting and detailing power of AutoCAD LT®, this new suite makes it more affordable and practical for AutoCAD LT users in manufacturing to take their design productivity to the next level, start benefiting from 3D and get on the path to Digital Prototyping.
AutoCAD Mechanical 2010 and AutoCAD Electrical 2010
AutoCAD Mechanical received a new user interface with improved dialogs and commonality with the AutoCAD ribbon makes experienced users even more productive and simplifies adoption for new users coming from standard AutoCAD. Together with the new automatic BOM Extraction utility it’s easier than ever for customers to migrate from AutoCAD while preserving their legacy data. AutoCAD Mechanical 2010 provides the best ever ROI for engineering customers who need to update the 2D workflows.
Electrical Designers can be even more productive with dynamically generated rules-based controls circuits based on components, wiring, ratings, and catalog data. Also with new one-line symbol library to create intelligent motor control one-line diagrams, a new ribbon interface and user defined workspaces, AutoCAD Electrical provides users unparalleled productivity and a clear advantage over companies that do the electrical diagrams in generic CAD programs.
2 Comments | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk, Announcements
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Take a Picture!
February 18, 2009 11:54 AMby Garin Gardiner
One of the best thing about my job is that I get to get out and meet many Inventor customers and see how they are using our products. Its great to see all types of products being designed, analyzed and built using Autodesk software. As you would expect I get a lot of questions about various areas in the software and even ideas on how we can make it better.
I received a question the other day that surprised me a little because I thought it was a fairly straight forward workflow although after thinking about it a little more realized it might not be as obvious as I once thought if you simply want to save an image from the Inventor model. There are applications that will allow you to capture the screen as well as Alt+Print Screen although there is a better way from Inventor.
Open up a part or assembly and position it how you would like it from a picture. I will often turn on Perspective to give it a bit more realism. From there select File > Save Copy As and change the Save as Type to an image format such as JPEG or PNG.
If you want to control how large the images will be, select the Options... button at the bottom of the dialog to specify pixels size in either the X or Y direction. In my case I want to it to be 500 pixels wide so I will only fill in the X direction and leave the Y blank.
From there I hit OK and thats it!
I hope this helps a few more of you out there to save out images from Inventor.
4 Comments | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Inventor LT, Tips, Autodesk Inventor
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Beam and Column Calculator Skill Builder
February 10, 2009 01:41 PMby Garin GardinerI am guessing many of you weren't aware of the Beam and Column Calculator found in Inventor. There are many Design Accelerators that are very useful that are often underused. Our Technical Publications team recently posted a new Skill Builder around using the Beam and Column Calculator.
Head on over to the skill builder to learn more about the Beam and Column calculator.
How many of you out there use Design Accelerators?
2 Comments | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Autodesk Inventor, Tips
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What is Inventor Fusion?
February 6, 2009 10:43 AMby Garin GardinerA few days ago we released an announcement about new technology called Inventor Fusion that will unite Parametric and Direct Model manipulation. That is one of those technologies that we have been sitting on pins and needles excited wanting to talk more about it. The Fusion team has posted some new videos that will give you a much better idea what Inventor Fusion is all about. Head on over to http://www.inventorfusion.com/ and check it out.
After you get a chance to watch the videos leave a comment on your thought.
If you are interested in reading the press release you can find it here.
1 Comment | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Autodesk, Autodesk Inventor, News
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Best Practices for Large Assemblies (AU class)
February 4, 2009 04:16 PMby Garin GardinerNow that we have Autodesk University past us there are several great classes online that you can watch. Periodically I will post a link to some of the classes that I think will be of benefit to many of you. The first class I will link to is all about best practices around large assemblies. If you work with large assembles and would like to get a little more bang for your buck, take a look at the following video.
Class Description
This session will provide methodologies and best practices for working with large Autodesk Inventor assemblies. With the last few releases of Autodesk Inventor, purpose-built tools have become part of the product for managing and working with large assemblies that consist of thousands of components. With the addition of these new tools, standard processes need to be implemented to ensure that desired productivity levels are achieved. This class will provide detailed information on several methodologies that you can implement, and many tips and tricks for using these tools. If you are a user of Autodesk Inventor or AutoCAD®, this class is for you. You'll leave with information that is sure to increase your productivity when working with large assembly models and drawings.0 Comment | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Tips, Autodesk Inventor
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Drive it!
February 3, 2009 10:45 AMby Garin GardinerBack in the early days of Inventor, one of the things that I really caught my eye was the ability to grab a component and drag it around. Depending on how it was constrained to the rest of the assembly, it would update all of the other components in realtime. Coming from Mechanical Desktop and being familiar with other 3D tools this was not so easy or satisfying for me as it was in Inventor.
Another one of the features that I really liked (and still do) was the ability to place a constraint on a component and animate it. This is probably something that many of you do on a regular basis although I know there are many of you that don't need moving parts that often so this one is for you.
Take the Arbor Press sample for example. Say you want to add an angle constraint to the handle and animate it rotating 180 deg to see the Ram lower.
Once you have an angle constraint in place you can right click on the constraint in the browser to bring up the Drive Constraint dialog. From here you can specify the start value as well as the end value and a delay if necessary. You can also record the animation once you select play if you turn on the record button (red circle). You can also expand the dialog to discover some other options for the animation.
Now select Play and watch it go!
Note: you can use Drive Constraint on more than just angle constraints so try if on Mate and Flush constratins as well.
0 Comment | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Autodesk Inventor, Tips