Here we are with another great release of Inventor that continues to be driven by you. Thank you to all of you who have taken the time to send us your feedback and suggestions. This article will provide an overview of the enhancements and improvements you should expect to see after installing Inventor 2023. Over the next several weeks, you will see multiple blog articles that dive deeper into each category.
There are a few major themes for this release. Our goal is to provide you with the enhancements you asked for to improve your design experience. We also know that collaboration is essential to you. A large amount of effort has been focused on interoperability with Revit and Fusion 360 with more efficient workflows that we will discuss later in this article and future articles. And we know that performance is a high priority for those working on large complex designs. We have several improvements that will boost your productivity.
Remember that we will cover the following items in more detail throughout the next few months. As you read the article, be sure to watch the great videos that Luke Mihelcic created as we walk through these enhancements. And click on the following link to register for the live webinar!
Sign up for the Inventor 2023 What’s New webinar
General Enhancements
As soon as you begin using Inventor 2023, you will see a difference in the Home screen display. As you would expect, it provides easy access to recently opened files and other helpful content. This is similar and consistent with the interface for Fusion 360, AutoCAD, and other Autodesk products making it easy to transition between them.
Are you using the Ray Tracing capability to quickly create a rendering of your design as you work? Inventor 2023 introduces a new display option that takes advantage of support for hardware ray tracing in recent graphics cards (GPUs). This feature is called GPU Ray Tracing. It is in a pre-release state and will be improved in future updates.
In earlier releases of Inventor, selecting the “Ray Tracing” display option in a viewport would use the Autodesk Raytracer (ART), which provides interactive results using only the CPU. Now you choose to use either CPU or GPU Ray Tracing, with the potential for higher performance and quality using your GPU.
Interoperability Enhancements
Revit to Inventor data exchange
In the past few years, the development team has continued to improve the way you work with others on different CAD software. For example, a lot of work has been done for Revit users looking to share their data with Inventor for custom fabrication. Inventor can already open Revit data and even choose the appropriate portions of the design for their needs. The same is true in this release, except there is no longer a need to export a separate file from Revit and email it to the Inventor user.
Now the Revit user selects the data they want to send and creates a data exchange that gets uploaded to Autodesk Docs. The Inventor user can then access the data exchange to load into their project. If the Revit data gets updated, it will remain associative inside Inventor without emailing a new revision file.
Inventor to Fusion 360
Have you considered some of the capabilities of Fusion 360 that complement Inventor? If you would like to create tool path strategies, advanced simulations, electronic design, or run a generative design study, you will find some one-click workflows in the Fusion 360 ribbon. The updated ribbon will provide a more intuitive approach to downstream workflows.
Part Modeling Enhancements
There is a new mark feature that has been introduced to Inventor 2023. Use sketch geometry to add marking features to your standard or sheet metal components. It can be displayed in 2D and 3D and exported within a flat pattern as a DXF or DWG. Marking styles will help control the modeling and export properties of your Mark features.
There are several enhancements for sheet metal, such as asymmetric contour flange extrusion, extended information in the browser, and a new option to export curved edges as tangent arcs.
You can now change the tolerance settings of each of the model states in your components. You can configure the tolerance, text, and Boolean parameters in an Excel spreadsheet if you prefer.
Assembly Modeling Enhancements
A new BOM Settings option was introduced in this release that lets you control zero quantity visibility and item number sequencing. Click BOM Settings and see the following options:
- Hide Suppressed components in BOM
- Automatically number items sequentially
Documentation Enhancements
When adding a 3D annotation, you may already know that you can reference iProperty information to the selected item using a leader. However, there hasn’t been a way to choose iProperties from the subassembly level or part level in the past. In the 2023 release, you now can reference the iProperty from any of the subassembly levels associated with the selected object.
When editing a detail view, use Edit Detail Properties to change the detail view boundary shape from circular to rectangular. The command is accessed from the view context menu in either the browser or the sheet.
The Datum Target command is added to the general annotation panel so you can establish datums on irregular surfaces. You can now create point, circle, and rectangle datum targets.
There are several enhancements made to weld and surface finish symbols for additional options in the command dialog and updates to industry standards.
Performance Improvements
Do you prefer to display threads in your design? There is now better performance even when showing a large amount of them in your assembly. The Punch Tool has also been improved significantly when you have several in your sheet metal components.
If you enjoy working in Express Mode for large assemblies, you will notice a boost in performance for changing the visibility of components.
Join Us! Inventor 2023 What’s New webinar
Don’t forget to join us for a what’s new in Inventor 2023 webinar to learn more and get your questions answered by our Inventor experts. We have two dates and times to choose from depending on your location.
Wednesday, April 20, 2022 | 2:00 PM (EST) [SIGN UP]
Thursday, April 21, 2022: 2PM (BST) | 3PM (CEST) [SIGN UP]
Be a part of the Inventor Community
Your feedback about Inventor is vital to us. To share feedback and product improvement requests with our Inventor team, please join the following communities:
- Inventor feedback community
- Inventor Ideas
- Inventor blog
- Inventor LinkedIn group
- Inventor Facebook page
- Autodesk University
Thank you very much for reading and once again thank to those of you who have taken the time to participate in the enhancements for this 2023 release of Inventor.
Jim Byrne
Product Marketing Specialist for Inventor
jim.byrne@autodesk.com
