Al Dean shot off to Portland, home of Autodesk’s Manufacturing Solutions division, to get an in-depth look at the 2010 product line. These are his initial thoughts

Flying 4,000 miles to look at some new technology would, for many, be considered madness - but for me, it’s a job. And when you get there and find a wealth of new things to look at, it makes all those hours sat in economy, next to the rather grumpy Dutch lady with personal space issues, all the more worthwhile. While Autodesk’s Mechanical development is split across almost every region of the globe, Portland is the management hub and the key decisions and movements are made from here.

The Manufacturing group’s remit and product line has expanded hugely in the last three or four years: from the days of AutoCAD Mechanical and Mechanical Desktop, through to Inventor and now has a range of analysis and manufacturing products. While the core is Inventor, this product has been expanded by acquisition from a 3D modelling and draughting system, to an integrated design and analysis platform.

The acquisition of Alias gave Autodesk a massive shot of adrenaline, both in terms of the types of customers it was talking to (particularly automotive), as well as providing a raft of technology that few would ever have a hope of replicating. Alongside the pretty much unparalleled surface modelling tools for both the industrial design and automotive worlds, Alias brought Showcase and SketchBook to the company - two applications which are now gaining more exposure than they ever could have under Alias alone.

So, with all this acquisition and development work going on, what does the 2010 release look like?

First off, Inventor 2010 looks incredible. The first thing you’ll notice is that the ribbon interface has been adopted across the entire Inventor suite of products. Now, while I’ve railed against this in other forms, when it’s done right, it works and works well. What’s interesting here is that alongside all of the acquired technologies, Autodesk has also been actually using its Labs website in earnest. While many other vendors maintain a Labs website, where ‘in late development’ code is put out for public consumption and comment, Autodesk is engaging its user community at a much earlier stage. In the last year or so we have seen the next Inventor UI be put through its paces on labs, along with many other tools which we’ll get to shortly. This means that the final shipped version has had all the rough spots knocked off, with users feeding back what’s good and bad, and it shows.

The categorisation of the commands (into discreet areas, such as design, assemble, inspect) is intuitive and is arranged sensibly. But what’s intriguing is how the new tools have been given the same reorganisation. A perfect example is the changes made in stress analysis.

The Ansys-based, parts only limitation of previous versions has been dumped and you’ll now find the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) technology from Plassotech has been introduced to the core Inventor product, enabling full assembly analysis. This can be driven from manual inputs, but a more intelligent way is to use the assembly simulation tools. These can be used to work out how loads transfer between components in motion and with respect to time, and then that data can be used to find maximum loading conditions and transfer all of the forces and loading data to Stress Analysis. Again, this is fully integrated into the same workflow, as the data is fully transportable (with contacts auto-created where possible).

It’s obvious that a lot of work has been done on these tools, and one thing particularly worth highlighting is the breadth of optimisation tools now available. While most FEA systems include some form of optimisation, Inventor now allows you to conduct design experiments where you can define goals, parameters and variables for optimisation, then use various techniques to find a smaller set of studies that will get you as close to your goals as possible. It’s quick to find the variables that have the greatest effect and influence on the performance of the design, enabling you to narrow down your geometry and get closer to the optimal in a shorter space of time.