Tube & Pipe

It is now possible to design process lines that comply with sterility and cleanable standards required for process equipment in the pharmaceutical, food, and personal care industries. You can now incorporate the correct slope into the pipe route including the use of drainable angle fittings that comply with appropriate standards.

Tube and pipe styles can be generated to support the design of self draining lines, using the 'self draining' option in the Tube and Pipe Styles Editor with the target slope or fall off angle. You can automatically generate hygienic pipe routes with the correct runoff to eliminate horizontal segments.

Frame Generator

Inventor 2009 Frame Generator allows you to set up frameworks and custom panels in just a few mouse clicks. It also addresses the needs of the many companies and individuals who use custom profiles. Examples of common uses include custom aluminium extrusions, dimensional timber, profiled wood, rails and miniature tubing.

There is a new Frame Shape Authoring tool for defining and publishing user-defined profiles. The authoring tool provides complete control over the data displayed in the Frame Generator interface. All profiles, including user-defined profiles, are now managed in the Content Centre. Multiple frame elements can be inserted in a single operation. Standard Inventor multi-select options, including window select, chain select and multi-select using , allow you to select and populate multiple elements. You can also work with the entire contents of a sketch by selecting the sketch browser node.

Visualisation and rendering

Inventor 2009 includes many enhancements to its state-of-art rendering and animation tool, Studio, so design engineers can maximise the realism and effectiveness when communicating with customers and other partners by creating high quality photo-realistic renderings and animations.

Now you can create sophisticated camera movements, such as fly-bys and walk-throughs quickly to add realism and maximise the effectiveness of animated renderings. Simply create 2D or 3D splines to define paths for both the camera position and camera target, associate them to the camera and then use the path edit handles to specify the start and end points along each path. The camera will follow the path while pointed at the location defined by the target path.

You can create images with increased realism by controlling the depth of field on each camera. The depth of field control simulates a real-world camera with focal plane and f-stop settings. Or you can define the near and far focus planes in relation to the model. With a broad depth of field, all or nearly all of a scene is in focus. With a narrow depth of field, only objects within a certain distance from the camera are in focus.

Studio now has a Video Producer, which allows you to add composited camera shots to your animations using existing cameras or by adding new ones. Simply by dragging cameras and fades to the Video Producer timeline and rendering the composited shots you can produce stunning visual output. Local lights on or in components move with the component when animated, and their parameters are respected and reflected when rendering images or animations. There are several techniques for setting up quick unconstrained animations by suppressing all or the top level constraints with just a few clicks.

Data Exchange

Design teams rarely work in isolation these days, so CAD data interoperability is a real issue for designers now as well as, more traditionally, metal cutters and CAE analyst types. With Inventor's new native translators you can avoid the time-consuming issues of incomplete or distorted data coming in via traditional 'neutral' formats like IGES and STEP. Now it's as simple as dragging in a foreign part file and in it comes.

Also, improvements in the geometry kernel simplify the process of using imported geometry in thicken and shell operations. Similarly it is also important to be able to publish accurate information in native format for distribution to customers and manufacturing partners without compromising the data integrity.

Native translators support direct data exchange between Autodesk Inventor and UGS/NX, SolidWorks or Pro/ENGINEER using Parasolid, native UG-NX, SolidWorks, GRANITE or native Pro/E. These translators were made available on Autodesk labs in May 2007 and have been downloaded over 6000 times.

In addition to the productivity gains for the engineer, CAD administrators can now set a maximum idle period for network licenses to optimise license utilisation. Licenses that are left unused for longer than this period are returned to the license pool and become available for other users. Sessions reactivated after the timeout period automatically seek a new license from the license server, allowing users to return to their work.

Conclusion

Inventor 2009 is one of those interesting releases, where nothing particularly stands out to make it an entirely new product, but there are a number of significant improvements which makes the software experience as a whole a lot more productive.

It offers significant productivity improvements especially in the core design tools that people tend to use every day. Digital prototypes of large scale designs, such as industrial plant, speciality vehicles or modern transportation systems, need the ability to construct and manage large assemblies which can run to tens or even hundreds of thousands of parts. Inventor is designed to support these projects through memory management tools and 64bit architecture, so working with large digital prototypes is no longer a show stopper.

Autodesk is really concentrating on productivity improvements - it seems they've got the message that the computer is there to take the strain and the tedium out of the CAD process, and it has given users new tools to really get things done.

Some of the user interface improvements are really quite inspired - the view cube is a great little addition, similarly the configuration thumbnails for large assemblies. The provision of a comprehensive set of direct native file translators means that time-consuming problems struggling with 'neutral' formats are a thing of the past.

Inventor Professional with its simulation tools allows you to explore more design options and evaluate performance and efficiency, up-front, as you build the digital prototype before any foam is cut, let alone metal.

The concentration on sheet metal manufacturing applications and tools, as opposed to taking a wider manufacturing and/or CAE view, could be of concern, although that could be in the pipeline. If they deal with other issues as comprehensively as they have dealt with sheet metal, then all types of users will be well catered for eventually.