Over the next few weeks, customers across the globe will start to see Inventor 2020 available for download in their Autodesk Accounts and the Autodesk Desktop App. Calendar year 2019 marks 20 years of Inventor in the market, and Inventor 2020 delivers enhanced user interface and workflows, more professional grade functionality and even more customer-driven improvements. We wanted to get you ready for what you will see after installing Inventor 2020.
The Inventor 2020 User Experience
Inventor 2020 delivers a new light theme interface that adds additional functionality and improves your productivity right from the start. We enhanced lighting styles, command icons, and added graphic presets so you can change multiple view settings based on Performance, Quality, or Balanced. Inventor 2020 also supports multi-monitor workflows so you can dock multiple Inventor files on different screens while working in a single Inventor session.
The Extrude, Sweep, Revolve and Thread commands have all been refreshed with the new property panel experience. Not only did we move these commands to panels (similar to Measure and Hole in Inventor 2018 & 2019), but we added functionality that you have been asking for. Sketching was also enhanced to allow for more complex region and loop selection for your designs.
All of these improvements were driven by countless hours of research and analysis from our user experience team. There are a lot of details on how we are continuing to improve the overall Inventor Experience and we will have another blog post dedicated to that in the upcoming weeks.
Professional Grade Enhancements
Enhancements were made from sketching to complex modeling to give you new functionality to your core design tools and workflows. The Sweep command was enhanced to add the ability to sweep a tool body. We worked with many of you to ensure we implemented this in a way that addressed your modeling needs. The tool body itself can be any shape, and the sweep can both remove and add geometry.
Brand new commands like Unwrap have been added. With Inventor 2020, you can use Unwrap to flatten nearly any set of faces into a flat surface. You can show this surface in a drawing or export it if needed. Many of you designing soft goods and stamped parts have been asking for this type of functionality.
Inventor 2020 continues to improve Frame Generator. You may have noticed we started improving Frame Generator quite a bit with the Inventor 2019 updates. This latest release moves many of the Frame Generator commands to the property panels. End Cap functionality was added and your Notch, Miter, and Insert Frame workflows have all been improved.
User-Driven Enhancements with Inventor Ideas
Many of the user-driven enhancements to Inventor 2020 come from your submissions through the Inventor Ideas page . This is a great way for you to see what your fellow users are asking for, vote for their ideas, or submit one of your own. In addition to the Ideas page, the Inventor team has direct customer engagements throughout the year. We visit customers at their location and have sessions where we invite customers to come to Autodesk offices. This type of engagement with you, Inventor users, helped define over 35 customer-driven enhancements into this release.
These enhancements vary from many of the Frame Generator improvements to Tube & Pipe file naming and performance to showing Sketch Blocks in the Relationships search.
Here is a great video showing many of the customer-driven enhancements in Inventor 2020
Over the next few weeks, the Inventor team will be posting more detailed articles on the Product Design and Manufacturing Collection, Factory Design Utilities, and more.
A huge “Thank you” to all of you who use Inventor and continue to provide feedback. Be sure to keep an eye on the Inventor blog for a lot of new topics on Inventor 2020.
Learn more about each of the features added on the Inventor what’s new page and plan your software update.
-Loren
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.
