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Autodesk Inventor 2011 (for AEC)
20 Oct, 2010 By: Robert GreenFirst Look Review: AEC users benefit from cross-platform collaboration between the software that designs the equipment and systems within buildings and the buildings themselves.
Editor's note: This article was originally published in the AEC edition of the Summer 2010 issue of Cadalyst. You may also read the Manufacturing-focused version of this article.
I know you're already asking, "Why would a CAD user in the AEC field care about a mechanical modeling tool such as Autodesk Inventor?" The answer may or may not surprise you: Increasingly, people who design containment buildings, factories, and research labs must plan those buildings around industrial equipment that is modeled using Autodesk Inventor. And more and more often — particularly as part of the IPD (integrated project delivery) workflow — building designers are using 3D mechanical CAD solutions to design custom building components for manufacture. All told, I've encountered a growing number of AEC projects in the past few years that involve a surprising amount of Autodesk Inventor geometry.
In today's world, a mechanical modeler is one more tool that might help you get your job done in the best way possible. In this First Look, I'll give you an overview of Autodesk Inventor 2011's new capabilities and highlight some of its more AEC-friendly features. Let's dive in.
User Interface
The user interface for Inventor 2011 still features an assembly browser along the left-hand side, the view cube and view control tools along the right-hand side, and the quick-access toolbar and ribbon controls along the top. A significant upgrade is that models now display as rendered design previews that update in real time. New users may take this graphically rich environment for granted, but veterans who always had to click back and forth between wireframe and rendered levels of graphics will appreciate the better visualization immediately.
The traditional Inventor user interface gets a boost with new real-time rendered design previews and the display of aggregated components in the assembly browser on the left. This figure also shows how the improved AEC Exchange lets you create connection points to enable precise placement of Inventor geometry in Revit.
Another, more subtle user interface upgrade is the ability to see the feature type when you select a feature of the assembly, along with a Help display that gives contextual information about commands relative to that feature. These features significantly improve the learning curve for new users. Like many BIM (building information modeling) tools, Inventor 2011 offers more and more context-sensitive guidance via right-clicking. The new heads-up display (HUD) puts editable parameters on the screen, right where the mouse can make input a nearly click-free procedure.
Assembly Advances
As figure 1 illustrates, Inventor 2011 aggregates many components, such as equipment pieces, frames, and flanges, into a large assembly that can be seen in the assembly browser along the left side of the screen. In the past, working with these complex assemblies required much manipulation of geometric constraints to tie all the various components together, making the process quite challenging for the inexperienced user. Inventor 2011 has, thankfully, made this process much easier.
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