Autodesk Vault 2012 offers integration with a host of design, visualisation and simulation tools within the Digital Prototyping portfolio, it can also be used to manage non-CAD data.
The 2012 release of Vault has seen us add integrations with a number of additional products and I wanted to share with you what functionality we now have in tools such as Inventor Publisher, Navisworks and 3ds Max Design.
The user interface to log-in, check-in\out etc is the same across most of the applications that has an add-in. You can see from the screen captures below that you don't need to learn anything new for most applications as the add-in looks the same, with the same functionality:
Microsoft Word:
Microsoft Outlook E-mail Message:
Autodesk Inventor 2012:
AutoCAD Mechanical 2012:
AutoCAD Electrical 2012:
Inventor Publisher 2012:
Navisworks 2012:
With the standard installation the Vault ribbon within Navisworks is not enabled. It's really quick and easy to enable this though, just click on Options on the Navisworks menu, go to Tools > Vault and click on where it says Show in User Interface. The next time you start Navisworks, the Vault ribbon will be available.
To access the Vault tools within Autodesk Simulation 2012 (previously called Autodesk Algor) just click on the Simulation menu icon at the top left and corner and select Vault Server from the list of tools to get access to the Vault functionality:
And last but certainly not least is 3ds Max Design. To use Vault to manage your 3ds Max Design data you first need to turn on Asset Tracking. To do this, just click on the Max menu icon in the top left hand corner and select Manage > Manage Assets... from the menu. Within the Asset Tracking dialogue, from the Options menu take the tick off Disable Asset Tracking if it is there.
Once Asset Tracking is enabled you can use the Asset Tracker to log-in to Vault and add all of your visualisation data.
You can also open data directly from the Vault using the Open from Vault tool..
Using Autodesk Vault with the add-ins discussed above gives you the ability to manage all of your data right from within the tools you use each and every day meaning you can focus on solving the design problems.
