In my first Inventor 2012 What’s New article I covered a lot of new and updated technology that has been added into this year’s release, but there’s still more to come and here it is…
Analyse Multi-Body Parts
If you create a part file (.ipt) that contains multiple solid bodies you can now use the stress analysis tools to add loads, constraints, materials etc to analyse the stresses, strains and deformations of the design.
High-Speed Drawings
If you are working with large complex datasets, depending on the specification of your workstation you might find it take a little bit of time to create the required 2D associative drawing views – not any longer! The addition of high-speed drawing views allow a user to place views on the drawing quickly and continue annotating them with dimensions, leaders, mechanical symbology etc. The way this works is that when you place a view onto the drawing initially they are a kind of ‘draft’ view that looks similar to the final view but not quite as ‘crisp’. In the background whilst you are annotating and adding detail to the drawing the views are being calculated until you get a final precise technical drawing view.
The great thing about this is that you don’t have to wait to add your annotations and details onto a drawing whilst you wait for the views to be calculated. You can get annotating straight away.
Wiki Based Help
The Autodesk Inventor help system is now cloud based! If you select Help from within Inventor or you type a search term in to the help you will be searching the on-line Wiki based help that doesn’t just contain the normal Inventor based help content, it also contains thousands of tips, tricks, best practices, videos etc from users of Autodesk products from all over the world.
Users can still have a locally installed help system if you don’t have web access which will contain all of the standard help files and tutorials.
Select
I like the new select tool – remember in previous releases you had the two arrows where you could cycle through the different faces, features, parts etc for selection? Well now you get a drop menu where you can highlight the exact geometry you want to select and easily select it from the list.
Project 2D Sketch to 3D Sketch
Here’s another really useful addition to Inventor 2012 – the ability to create a 2D sketch and then project that to create a 3D sketch across multiple faces.
All you need to do is create a 2D sketch like this one:
And using the new Project to 3D Sketch tool:
Select the faces you want to project your sketch to and hey presto, a 3D sketch which is associative to the 3D sketch. If you modify the 2D sketch the 3D sketch will update accordingly.
G2 Variable Radius Fillets
Autodesk Inventor has always had the ability to create variable radius fillets but in the 2012 release we have added support for G2 continuity for variable radius fillets. There’s also a neat trick where you can easily see how variable radius fillets will affect a design dynamically. Have a watch of this video to see this in action:
