| Inventor Fusion tech preview |
| Written by Al Dean - Develop3D | |
| Tuesday, 28 July 2009 | |
| Page 1 of 3 Al Dean gives his first impressions of Autodesk’s brand new direct modelling technology preview. Now available to the general public as a free download, the software represents a promising opening move 
Unlike Inventor 2010, Inventor Fusion doesn’t rely on history. Features are still very much an intrinsic part of the application, but it doesn’t carry with it the headache of history recalculation when features are edited
Representing Autodesk’s first foray into the world of direct geometry editing, Inventor Fusion is arguably one of the most eagerly awaited technology launches this year. First shown at Autodesk University in Dec 2008, the technology is now available for free download from the Autodesk Labs web-site. Out of all the CAD vendors, Autodesk has one of the most impressive Labs sites and many core parts of Inventor began as Technology Previews, just as Fusion has now. It is likely to remain in Autodesk Labs for some time as each successive public release is put out for all to see, play with and give feedback to help drive its development - so let’s take a quick look at what all the fuss is about. LESS IS MOREThe Inventor Fusion user interface is minimal to say the least and because it has a small set of commands view manipulation is pretty much standard as in Inventor 2010, with keyboard shortcuts for pan/zoom/rotate as well as the everpresent View Cube and Navigation bar to give you quick access to view settings. The familiar browser is integrated into the user interface, rather than as a separate panel and gives access to named views, origins, work geometry, annotation planes and a feature list - but no history and this is key, as Fusion is a history-free modelling technology. The user experience is highly dynamic with less reliance on toolbars and menus. This is a heads up interface to the extreme. Much of Fusion is driven from marking menus, something that was introduced into the Alias products many years ago and adopted by many modelling packages as a replacement for the context sensitive right hand mouse button menu. Fusion combines the two. Hit the Right Mouse Button (RMB) and a marking menu pops up along with a more traditional menu (see Figure 2). This provides access to all of the commands you’ll need - the most important found on the marking menu while the traditional menu gives you a fuller, context sensitive selection. The sketching workflow in Fusion is very slick. Informal dimensions are placed on the fly, and users can snap and infer relationships while hitting values locks them down (typically for length and angle, using tab to toggle between the two). One thing to note is that Fusion defaults to inches. To switch it to mm, hit the scale key at the bottom right of the screen. |
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