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. Those suggestions helped to shape over 100 enhancements over the past year.
Inventor 2024 is packed with new features and enhancements to improve your design experience. We also know that documentation is essential to effectively communicate your designs to manufacturing. You will find enhancements for 3D annotations as well as 2D drawings. And we know that performance is a high priority for those working on large complex designs. We have continued our commitment to speed up your engineering workflows.
This article will highlight several of the enhancements you should expect to see after installing Inventor 2024. For a complete list of enhancements, be sure to visit the Inventor online help guide.
A special thanks to James Willoughby for creating all of the video demonstrations below.
General enhancements
Section View
The section view definition persists in the design view representation. You can easily edit your section views or suppress the section by right-clicking on the view representation node.
You also have control of the end cap preview during section view plane dragging. It will be turned off by default if your assembly is greater than or equal to 500 parts.
Graphics
Until now, Inventor Studio had a 4096 x 4096 pixel rendering output. The limitation has been removed and Inventor Studio will render images up to 16K x 16K resolution, depending on what your graphics card supports.
Custom Environment Image Support
The workflow for using custom HDR and EXR images with IBL lighting styles is much improved and is supported for both CPU and GPU ray tracing.
Support for IBL backgrounds
GPU ray tracing now supports rendering with IBL backgrounds.
Perspective with ortho faces as the default
It is now possible to set “Perspective With Ortho Faces” as the default view setting in both Document Settings and Application options.
Part modeling enhancements
Parameters window
The parameter window extends export functionality to text and boolean parameters in the user parameters section. This allows us to access parameters in other places, such as the iProperties where we can insert them as part of a live description, or simply display them in the custom iProperties tab.
Mark feature
The Mark feature was introduced last year in Inventor 2023 enabling you to laser etch or mark your 3D models.
We’ve now improved that in 2024 by adding a behavior section to the property panel. In addition to being able to etch in three different directions, there are now two different marking methods.
- Project will apply the mark across all faces in it’s path, even if they are not coplanar.
- We’ve also added the ability to wrap a mark. This allows the mark to wrap around corners or be applied to curved geometry such as shafts or cylinders.
Oriented minimum bounding box option
You can derive a solid body as an oriented minimum bounding box. A new “Oriented minimum bounding box” option is added to the Options tab of the Derived Part, Derive Assembly and Make Part dialogs. By default, the option is checked. Uncheck the box to derive a body as the orthogonal bounding box.
New Finish Feature
The new Finish feature enables you specify appearance and manufacturing processes in your part and assembly models. It provides rich data as you apply material coatings, heat treatments, surface texture, or paint color.
The Finish feature is supported by Model States for maintaining variable processes for your 3D model.
3D annotations enhancements
Model-Based Definition
There are a few new enhancements for MBD in Inventor 2024
- When applying a linear dimension, it can now be specified as an envelope requirement.
- We’ve also expanded the annotation scales to include 1:5.
- When annotating the profile of a planar surface, it was previously possible to specify ‘all around,’ Inventor 2024 also adds ‘All over’ to the note options.
- And finally, in the drawing environment, we’ve added the ability to extract 3D annotations from a part contained in an assembly file. Simply switch to the 3D annotations tab and select the source.
Weld symbol
On the annotate ribbon there is now a welding symbol option to allow you to add welding PMI information to your designs. The dialogue is almost identical to the drawing environment allowing you great flexibility over your welding symbols. Of course as always, we can bring these notes through into the drawing environment.
Remember, you don’t have to create a weldment assembly for this, 3D weld symbols are also supported in normal assemblies and even multi-body part files.
And with QIF or STEP 242 we can export this information to other systems and viewers.
Drawing enhancements
Revision clouds
Revision clouds are full-fledged Inventor objects and no longer in the SDK. Add them to drawing sheets or views, move them around, add or delete vertices, and like other annotation styles the formatting is managed using the Styles Editor. Since they are sketch-based, they can be edited either in their cloud state or from the sketch.
Edge symbol
You can now define an Edge Symbol based on ISO 13715:2019 standard. The new Edge Symbol command is added to the Symbols panel of the Annotate tab as well as the drawing Style and Standard Editor.
Tube and Pipe
In previous versions of Inventor, it was only possible to add a 45 or 90 degree elbow to a rigid pipe run. Starting from this release, it is now possible to apply custom angled elbows.
iLogic Vault Workflow Enhancements
With Inventor 2024, working with Vault has never been easier. New functions added to iLogic allow Inventor to check out, get files, search Vault, and much more as part of your automations. Vault code snippets added to the editor make it easy to quickly get started.
Fusion 360 interoperability
Access to Manual Inspection added to Fusion 360 tools
From within Inventor you can send a part (.ipt) file to Fusion 360 and create manual inspection tasks.
Fusion Exports Workflow
If a change has occurred in the Inventor model state or design view used for a Fusion 360 export, and you click Open in Fusion 360 in the export context menu, you are notified that the Inventor model and Fusion 360 model are out of sync and are given the option to update the Fusion 360 model before opening it.
Join Us! Inventor 2024 What’s Now, New, and Next webinar
Don’t forget to join us for a what’s now, new, and next 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 26, 2023 | 11:30 AM (EST) [Watch the recording]
Thursday, April 27, 2023: 3PM (BST) | 4PM (CEST) [Watch the recording]
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