Inventor 2018: It’s Here!

Inventor 2018 will start officially rolling out today. Thousands of you have met with our development team, and tried out alphas and betas over the past year. You have shared your thoughts and made your mark on the Inventor 2018 release. We can’t thank you enough for the feedback. We’ll be digging into specific enhancements over the next few weeks, but I wanted to give you a quick overview of the overall release and some background on what it includes.

For Inventor 2018, we focused on three key areas for the release: Professional-Grade Design, Expanded Interoperability, and The Inventor Experience.

Here we go…

Professional-Grade Design

Professional-Grade Design is all about the core functionality our customers need every day. New tools, enhanced workflows, and improved performance are all about helping you get your work done faster. Inventor 2018 has a nice mix of new functionality and enhancements to existing tools geared toward professional-grade design.

As everyone knows, your design tool can never be fast enough. Especially when working with large assemblies and drawings. Building on work we have been implementing over the past few releases, Inventor 2018 delivers significant performance improvements for customers who need to open, update and navigate faster with their Inventor assemblies and drawings. Based on feedback from customers during the alpha and beta testing of Inventor 2018, users have reported speed improvements from 2X-10X on their designs.

Sketching is core to any Inventor design. And user feedback drove us to make geometry projection more seamless and robust within the sketch environment. Inventor 2018 users will save time and effort constraining and dimensioning their sketch geometry to projected model faces and edges. Those references will also stay intact as users edit geometry and sketch planes in their models.

Many Inventor customers design sheet metal parts as part of their daily design workflow. We have continued investing in sheet metal functionality with Inventor 2018. Customers designing multi-body sheet metal parts will be able to define separate sheet metal rules for each body in their sheet metal designs. This means that multiple parts, materials, and thicknesses can all be defined in a single Inventor 2018 sheet metal part file.

We have seen customer demand for tighter integration between design and manufacturing, as well an industry push toward model based engineering. With Inventor 2018, we added an entire new set of functionality by including integrated Model Based Definition (MBD) as part of every seat of Inventor. Tolerance features are automatically recognized using an embedded GD&T engine (powered by Sigmetrix). This workflow allows designers to create fully constrained models, that can be reliably used downstream. Users will be able to leverage MBD data for downstream consumption (tolerance analysis, CMM, CAM, etc.). Inventor 2018 allows for publishing 3D PDF and STEP AP242 of your part files with MBD and 3DA information included.

Expanded Interoperability

Inventor 2018 delivers new capabilities for customers who work with a variety of design data and formats. Being able to consume, leverage and publish a wide range of 2D and 3D files has become critical for engineers in today’s complex collaborative design environment.

Building on current mesh file support, Inventor 2018 now allows customers to leverage mesh files in their Inventor 2D drawings. Mesh data is supported for annotation and dimensioning in all drawing view types. Not only can you display mesh data in your drawings with your 3D designs, you can add smart dimensions to the faceted mesh edges and faces.

Customers in the building product space have had the need to publish their Inventor designs as BIM ready content. With Inventor 2017 R2 we enabled our customers to publish BIM Content to Configurator 360 to allow for download of Revit and IFC formats of their designs. Inventor 2018 has streamlined the BIM Content environment with an updated Shrinkwrap command and the ability to directly export Autodesk Revit and IFC formats from within Inventor.

With AnyCAD in Inventor 2018, we are taking the first steps in backward compatibility between Inventor versions. With this release, users will be able to use AnyCAD workflows to leverage Inventor 2018 parts and assemblies into their Inventor 2017 designs. This is great for supplier collaboration and organizations with divisions that need to move up to the latest version of Inventor before others.

The Inventor Experience

Inventor 2018 continues to focus on customer feedback and Inventor Ideas submissions. Customer-driven enhancements can be seen throughout Inventor 2018. Customers will see improve core workflows and model interaction, along with newly streamlined workflows to help Inventor 2018 users be more productive than ever before.

The browser and measure command have been completely refreshed in Inventor 2018 with a new panel concept experience. The result is more functionality that is much easier to use. The Inventor 2018 browser has new search, filter, tab and docking capabilities. The measure tool update was based on extensive user feedback and validation. Measure went from four commands to a single, more complete, toolset for Inventor customers.

Starting with Inventor 2016, multiple updates to Inventor were released throughout the year. From the release of Inventor 2017 to today, there have been over 50 Inventor Ideas requests implemented into the product. And we have no intention of slowing down. Many of the customer Ideas requests we are evaluating now are quite large from a development perspective. So, I will tell you what I tell my children at Christmas as they get older, “you may get a few less presents…but, they are a lot bigger.”

On behalf of all of us on the Inventor team (developers, QA, user experience, product management, product marketing, etc) I want to thank everyone who contributed to this release by testing via the Feedback Community, sharing your thoughts, and sending us your Inventor Ideas. We hope you love what Inventor 2018 delivers!