Autodesk Inventor 2012 - Whats New?
So what’s new in Inventor 2012? We know all about the new Product Design Suite and all of the tools that come with that, but what has been added to the latest release of Inventor? Here’s a few of my favourite new additions, I'll be posting more on the new and enhanced features within Inventor 2012 over the coming days.
Marking MenuIf you’ve been using Alias Design or Inventor Fusion then you will have already experienced using the right-mouse click marking menu (did you know that the marking menu is patented technology?). We’ve added the context sensitive marking menus to Inventor right-mouse click so that when you click on the right-mouse button, you will be prompted with a context sensitive set of options that you can select.
The cool thing about this though is the more you get used to using the marking menu, all you actually need to do is hold the right mouse button down and move it in the direction of the tool you wich to use. For example – just hold with the right mouse button and move your mouse to the 12 o’clock position and you will invoke the line tool, You don’t need to select it, just move your mouse to that position.
If you find that you use some of Inventors commands more than others, you can customise the marking menu from within the Tools > Customise… option to add the tools you want.
Mini Toolbars\Heads Up Display
We saw the addition of the mini-toolbars in Inventor 2011 and we have further expanded their functionality within Inventor 2012.
We have added access to more options within the mini-toolbar and added them to more tools. We’ve also added enhanced previewing when you are adding a feature such as holes and fillets. You’ll now notice that you get a real-time preview that you can interact with. In this example you can see the real-time preview of the variable radius fillet with access to all of the options we need to edit it within the mini-toolbar.
Ray Tracing
Further enhancing the visualisation we added into Inventor in the last release we have now gone even further to add Ray Tracing directly into the Inventor graphics window.
Just click on the Ray Tracing tool to have your Digital Prototype rendered within the graphics window which you can use to explore and review your design with your colleagues in a visually rich environment.
Eco Materials Advisor
The Eco Materials Advisor (or EMA for short) sees our partnership with UK based Granta right inside of the design environment. From within Inventor you can launch EMA to find out how sustainable your design is based on a whole host of material properties and information from the Granta Materials Database.
At the touch of a button you can find out Energy Consumption, how much CO2 your design uses, how recyclable it is and if it meets with regulatory compliance such as RoHS and WEEE. Having this capability right inside the design environment means that design engineers can make better material choices and decisions about material usage earlier within the design process.
Create Mold Design
If you are using the mould and tool functionality within Inventor Professional, one neat new addition is the ability to start a new mould tool design right from within the part environment. Previously you would have to save the part, start a new mould template and then insert the component, now you just click on Create Mold Design and away you go.
Edit Form
I’m planning on adding a post specifically about Inventor Fusion and the tools available such as Alias Edit, but I wanted to point out that from within Inventor you can choose to Edit Form and also Edit Copy of Form. Selecting either of these will load the current part (or a copy of the part) into Inventor Fusion where you can use the curve network editing tools to create organic shapes.
Once finished, hit the Return to Inventor option and your edited model is back in the Inventor environment where you can add all the engineering intent.
iLogic Form Creator
This has to be one of my favourite additions to the new Inventor 2012 functionality!
We’ve always been able to create forms that we can use to drive iLogic rules within Inventor, but up to this point the forms would need to be created within something like Visual Studio, then create a dll and link it to Inventor.
Now we have the ability to create a form quickly and easily from within Inventor where a design engineer can drive the design based on the rules and parameters within the iLogic rules.
Have a watch to see how the iLogic Form Creator works……
Source :http://autodeskmfg.typepad.com/blog/2011/03/autodesk-inventor-2012-whats-new.html