Happy New Year! As we transition into the year 2025, we would like to reflect on a great year of enhancements for Autodesk Inventor. The development team continues to work hard to include your requests. They released three major updates that included 150 enhancements based on your feedback. Thank you for your effort and contributions to helping to make Inventor the best it can be for your most important design work. We received thousands of votes to drive the focused areas for each release. Your votes play a significant role, not only in each enhancement but also in maintaining the highest level of stability so you can focus on your designs without disruption.
Inventor 2025 Feature Highlights
Let’s look at some notable enhancements you saw this year. To see a complete list of enhancements, visit the online help guide or watch our video demonstrations on YouTube.
Sheet metal
Inventor 2025 introduced a modernized interface for designing sheet metal components, making the process more intuitive and efficient than ever before. The new UI streamlines design workflow by placing tools in a logical order and making previously hard-to-find features readily accessible.
Part modeling
Let’s take a look at part modeling enhancements. Starting with boundary options for patterning. If your pattern crosses a selected sketch boundary, you can specify to omit those instances.
There are three new options
- Only accept instances within the boundary
- Keep them if the centroid is inside the boundary
- Or if the base points are inside the boundary
These options are also available for sketch-based patterns.
You may remember the Finish feature was new last year for Inventor 2024. This year there were several enhancements added.
Include and exclude selectors were added for ease of use. Switch between solid body, surface body, or faces for selection. And if you’re using “Make Part”, your finish features will show in the derived part.
And you will also find an option to show extended names in the browser. For example, you may want it to display the following.
- Material coating
- Heat treatment
- Surface texture
- Paint
Assembly modeling
While using the simplify command, you can select bounding boxes or cylinders for your components. This is great for creating a highly simplified envelope for complex parts in your assemblies. It will reduce the amount of memory needed to work on very large designs.
How do you color your parts in your subassemblies? What sort of standard are you using for colors? We know that color can make it easier to find parts or understand the assembly better. Now in 2025, you can quickly change the color of everything temporarily.
Select from the following options to automatically change color:
- Individual parts
- Unique parts of the same color
- Top-level subassemblies
- Unique top-level subassemblies of the same color
And there is the option to customize the colors that are used. You will find this in the color scheme editor in the application options.
Drawings
There are a lot of enhancements to talk about for annotations. You can use presets in general notes for text, symbols, and parameters.
You can also add background color fill to drawing dimensions. This may improve the readability of dimensions on a background color. Note that the background fill is supported when exporting to DWG.
If you are creating parts lists, then you can add parts list properties from selected parts to the text dialog.
Some of you are using revision cloud arc which was new last year. You can now edit the size of the cloud arcs around smaller details in the view. There is also an option to edit the revision cloud as you create them for quick changes.
Diameter and radius dimensions now have the option to hide the extension line.
Right-click on the dimension to find the setting. And if you are creating tables in your drawings then you will find a new option to merge cells.
There are several enhancements in the drawing styles editor. Inventor continues to see updates for ISO standards. Standards for arc symbols and surface texture have been addressed in this release.
You will find a new option for revision tables. You can now set the default to alpha or numeric. And there’s a new option in the styles editor for BOM sort order. Change the sort settings for primary, secondary, and tertiary columns along with an “auto sort on update” checkbox.
Finally, crop views have been added to styles to set the preferences for break lines and symbols.
Interoperability
We’ve enhanced the interoperability of our software ecosystem with significant improvements to import and export functionality. The major reveal is the IFC import feature, which allows for robust handling of assemblies, either by referencing or converting them. Additionally, the RFA export has been optimized to offer greater graphical fidelity, ensuring high-quality visuals in exported models.
Also, some notes on Revit & BIM specifically. We’ve added the ability to import Revit Models going back as far as 2023 as well as updated the simplify command and added a new prompt to install the necessary version of Revit.
Informed Design for Inventor
The Informed Design workflow for Inventor and Revit enhances design interoperability by enabling manufacturers to author and publish customizable building products, components, or assemblies.
Designers can then access, customize, and incorporate these designs into the Revit environment files, adhering to any predefined constraints.
A bi-product of the workflow is the automatic generation of manufacturing documentation in the web portal.
Customer focused webinars
We have conducted dozens of webinars this year for design and manufacturing solutions. Be on the lookout for more customer-focused webinars as we head into next year. See this webinar where we partnered with Woodway to discuss how they automate their design and engineering processes.
Looking forward to a bright 2025
Thank you to our wonderful community of Inventor users who influence the future of how your products get designed and manufactured successfully. Continue to communicate your ideas to us and to the rest of the user community. We look forward to 2025 as we collaborate with you to tackle your biggest challenges.
