DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

Looks like the Autodesk 2011 product line is starting to break ground and make its way into public, from closed beta test. Rob Cohee at Autodesk recently posted some videos that show what’s new in Inventor 2011 much better than me yakking about it. So, knock yourselves out peeps.

Alias Design for Inventor

Watch this. Watch it again. Then tell me you don’t want it. Now. Its been a long time coming, but as a first pass this is a good go at it. The commands look intuitive and capable for creating form - it looks quite similar to the ISDX tools that PTC has within Pro/Engineer, particularly in both the forms you can create as well as the fact that it creates and stores this type of geometry as a single “Alias Freeform” feature in the history tree.

Direct maniulation

Nice set of tools for direct creation and editing tools

iLogic

Visualisation

This is a key one for me. Autodesk has a wealth of knowledge in house from its Media and Entertainment division as well as the teams behind Alias and Showcase to name but a few - so its no surprise that this technology has been introduced. Today many are using rendering to create photorealistic images for all manner of purposes - from design review to - what’s interesting here si that image-base lighting is in there (though its not clear if its HDR or standard image-based lighting), as well as transportability between Inventor and 3dsmax which now retains materials. I can’t imagine that you’d want to do hardcore design work with all these effects switched on (it might be too confusing for true design work), but as an enabler for design review, for discussion with peers, without the need for an additional tool or rendering, it’s going to be seriously useful.

Inventor Publisher 2011

We talked about it a while ago when it went live as a Tech Preview - now its going to ship within Inventor proper. Its a technical illustration tool and starting to move towards technical documentation. From the screen cast, it looks like its a seperate app, which would be useful for those with separate tech pubs staff who don’t need full Inventor.

There’s a whole load more videos on Rob’s youtube channel, so if you’re in the mood, check it out here.