Inventor Suite 2009 – What’s New Overview

By Forrest Judd,
MCAD Solutions Engineer
Hagerman & Company
Nashville, TN

This month Autodesk brings us a host of new mechanical product releases, one of the most important being Autodesk Inventor Suite 2009. I want to take some time to share with you the highlights of this latest release.

The hallmark of the Inventor Suite 2009 release is increased productivity. Autodesk has asked its customers what they need to deliver more accurate models and drawings in a shorter amount of time with less effort and has delivered a slew of enhancements with that goal in mind. But enough sales talk – let’s dive into the new features!

Snazzy Sheet Metal Advancements

Inventor Suite 2009 continues the trend of sheet metal enhancements that started with the 2008 release. Changes to corner options, sheet metal styles, part authoring and even the modeling kernel itself will greatly improve your sheet metal modeling experience.

Corners and More Corners!

Several enhancements have been made to sheet metal corner seams. These include:

Flattering Flat Patterning, Families, and Fasteners!

Improvements to iPart creation now allow for effective creation of Sheet Metal iParts. Sheet Metal iPart members can reference general sheet metal rules and sheet metal unfolding rules. A prime use for this would be to create various flat patterns for different suppliers with different manufacturing capabilities, or different processes within your own environment.

Sheet Metal iParts now include both the folded model and the flat pattern. This allows you to directly modify the flat pattern of individual family members to allow for different manufacturing or documentation methods.

Improvements to the drawing manager and flat patterns such as Named Flat Pattern Orientations and the ability to select the flat pattern of specific members for drawing views will remove the tedium surrounding the creation and documentation of Sheet Metal iParts.

Finally, the introduction of PEM® brand fasteners to the Content Center will allow us to easily create and document the entire Sheet Metal assembly without the need to redraw standard components. These fasteners can be used with both the Bolted Connection Generator and AutoDrop.

All of these new tools should greatly improve your ability to create accurate sheet metal parts, assemblies, and drawings while reducing the overall time it takes to create them. Aren’t new releases great?

Delightful Drawing Developments

While we all love creating in 3D, communication of our designs still largely takes place via 2D detail drawings. Autodesk realizes this, and with Inventor 2009 they introduce several improvements to make documenting our designs faster and easier. These improvements include:

Fantastic Frame Generator Functionality

Customize to Your Heart’s Content

The Frame Generator has been available for use with Inventor for a few years now. It’s a fantastic tool, up to a point. Its major drawback in prior releases was the lack of an easy way to customize its content.

Inventor 2009 delivers to us the ability to add our own custom content. This Frame Shape Authoring tool allows you to add any custom cross section you choose for use with the Frame Generator:

In addition, the Frame Generator content library is now fully integrated with the Content Center, simplifying database management by unifying all content into a single location.

Pick Like a Pro

Along with the ability to customize the Frame Generator content, we can now define which shapes go where with more efficiency:

Edges can now be selected as a group using any of the standard multi-select options available in other areas of Inventor. These include Multi-Select (using the CTRL key), Chain Select to select connected edges, Sketch Select to select an entire sketch’s elements, and the classic Window and Crossing Window methods. Frame creation just keeps getting easier!

Awesome Assembly Enhancements

So far I’ve discussed several improvements to part and drawing creation. But what about assemblies? No worries, there’s plenty to be pleased about with assemblies in Inventor 2009.

Assembly Substitutes

There’s no doubt that Inventor has grown over the past few years. The vast, useful improvements introduced during this span don’t come without a price, however - the application is as resource hungry as ever. Coupled with the ever-more-complex models we’re creating, many users are reaching the limits of their hardware and OS of choice. Just in time, Autodesk has introduced some handy tools that allow us to manage our resources more effectively.

The most useful of these is the concept of Assembly Substitutes:

You can use a substitute part to represent an assembly when you don’t need access to all of the assembly’s detail, but you still need to see how components and sub-assemblies interact.

You can use a simple part when you want to hide a lot of detail or use the Derived Assembly tool to generate a substitute that provides an accurate lightweight representation of the assembly. While it was already an efficient method of resource management, the Derived Part tool has a new Reduced Memory mode – making derived parts consume even less memory.

Angle Constraints with real power

Angle constraints by their nature are somewhat ambiguous. Prior to Inventor 2009 it wasn’t simple to provide an absolute angular constraint. This could lead to unpredictable assembly behavior. That changes in Inventor 2009:

While the directed and undirected options are still available for Angular constraints, the introduction of the Explicit Reference Vector option allows for the creation of an unambiguous angular relationship.

Besides Assembly Substitutes and the new options for Angular constraints, several other enhancements have been made. These include:

Practical Part Improvements

Along with the specific changes to Sheet Metal parts, some general improvements have been made to the part modeling environment.

Complex Part Modeling

The Shell, Boundary Patch, and Fillet tools have been improved to further streamline plastic and cast part design. You can now select a subset of tangent faces, providing greater control over the faces that are removed by the shell operation. Fillets now allow a new minimal setback option which generates smoother transitions between intersecting fillets. Finally, the To termination option of the Extrude command now allows the selection of a sketch point, a work point, or a vertex.

More Productive Sketching

Several enhancements to the sketch environment were made based on feedback from the user community. These include:

Another Great Release!

With Inventor Suite 2009, Autodesk has continued its recent trend of delivering a fantastic, ever-improving 3D solid modeling package. This article’s limited space can only address a few of the numerous enhancements we are greeted with this year. For more information on specific improvements visit www.autodesk.com or consider attending one of our 2009 Autodesk Experience Tour events. Either way, these improvements are too great to overlook. Aren’t you glad you’re on subscription?