Customers will soon begin seeing Inventor 2019 available for download from in your Autodesk Account and the Autodesk desktop app. This launch marks the 23rd major Inventor release over the past 19 years and we can’t thank customers enough for all the feedback and input that went into it. Thousands of customers provided Inventor Ideas, interacted with the product team in the Feedback Community and shared feedback throughout the alpha and beta program. The result is our best Inventor yet.
Over the upcoming weeks, many of us on the product team will be posting articles covering some of the new functionality. Today, let’s take a big picture look at Inventor 2019.
Performance
No one has ever said “my CAD system is just too darn fast!” because people are constantly pushing their tools harder and harder. Inventor customers in particular are pushing the envelope by designing bigger and more complex assemblies—it is now commonplace to see Inventor assemblies with 10,000 or more parts. For the past few releases we’ve put a dedicated focus on large assembly performance and the 2019 release delivers results throughout the entire design, edit and documentation process. For a list of specific areas of improvement with the 2019 version, check out the online help.
Automation
iLogic is the automation engine built into Inventor. It’s used by a huge number of our customers every day for automating tasks, ensuring compliance with standards, and driving design configurations. With use of iLogic on the rise, we’ve been improving the usability of iLogic and making it more powerful. A few months ago, iLogic global triggers enabled companies to begin managing rules on a network where they could be much more easily managed across an organization. Auto-complete was added to streamline rule authoring, providing helpful information about rules and guidance on syntax directly within the rule editor. Now, with Inventor 2019, iLogic users get a new capability to build up models from scratch which provides far greater flexibility and power when configuring new assemblies. Parts in an assembly can be added or deleted by your iLogic rules, enabling more flexible and scalable creation of new designs. Along with this, customers can now name geometry and capture the current state of their iLogic models to help with rule creation.
Model Based Definition and 3D Annotation
Model Based Definition was launched last year directly inside of Inventor. It was based on demand from customers to either streamline manufacturing by either automating drawing creation or eliminating drawings altogether. To help customers even more, we have added Face Status Coloring to help users ensure their 3D models are fully constrained with MBD.
Connected
Inventor 2019 allows users to collaborate, design, and communicate their designs in new and powerful ways. Shared Views allows Inventor users to publish a viewable of their design to the Autodesk Viewer allowing for markup, comment and viewing by outside stakeholders. All the feedback appears as a feed directly in Inventor. Shared Views is a subscription benefit that many Autodesk customers will see not only in Inventor, but also AutoCAD, Vault, Civil 3D, Alias, Plant3D, PowerMill, FeatureCAM, Moldflow, 3ds Max, and Infraworks products. It’s a simple, fast, flexible way to get feedback on whatever you’re working on in any of these products.
AnyCAD for Fusion 360 continues as a Preview in Inventor 2019. This Preview allows customers to experience new features on a test-only basis within Inventor before these features are fully released. With AnyCAD Inventor users can directly read in native Fusion 360 designs (.fusiondesign) as part of their Inventor designs. Because the connection is associative, a change made in Fusion can easily be accounted for inside Inventor. This new AnyCAD workflow allows users to take advantage of the power of Inventor and Fusion 360 together.
Inventor Experience
Customers expect every part of Inventor to be great. We launched the Inventor Ideas page a few years ago as an additional channel for the user community to provide feedback on what they’d like to see in the product. Many of the 200+ Ideas enhancements from the past two years came from the Ideas page, and Inventor 2019 continues that trend with features addressing 25 more customer-submitted Ideas. The refreshed Hole Command is one of the bigger highlights. With hole type presets and the sketch integration that allows you to define multiple holes quickly and easily, it stands as a great example of how we are adding brand new functionality and improving the experience with every Inventor update.
I speak for all of us on the Inventor team when I give a big ‘Thank You’ to all the Inventor customers for continuing to provide feedback, testing and most importantly, using Inventor every day. Be sure to keep checking back here on the Autodesk Inventor Blog to hear more about all we delivered in Inventor 2019!
Loren Welch – Product Manager, Inventor Product Line
email – loren.welch@autodesk.com
twitter – @lorenwelch
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenwelch
Loren Welch is a Product Manager for the Inventor product line at Autodesk. Loren has over 20 years of industry experience in multiple CAD/CAM/CAE/PDM software applications and rapid prototyping solutions. He has been at Autodesk since 2008, where he currently manages customer engagement and cloud initiatives for the Autodesk Inventor product line.
