New Product Review - Autodesk® Inventor® Publisher

One of the most time-consuming tasks in the field of engineering is to transfer knowledge to manufacturing, field service, end users, and sales partners. The need to transfer information ranges from assembly instructions, user manuals, operating procedures, maintenance and repair instructions. Sometimes the design isn’t fully completed until a few days before shipment, and proper documentation suffers because of time constraints. Incorrect documentation can be detrimental to a product or a company’s success. The adage "A picture is worth a thousand words" is so true in this case and even more so with 3D animated instructions. This is where Autodesk Inventor Publisher comes into play. This new product is designed for non-CAD users to work directly with 3D design models. Now non-engineering departments can use engineering CAD data to produce marketing illustrations and procedural information without having to interrupt engineering.

You can import popular 3D CAD models such as DWG (3D), STEP, IGES, SAT, ProENGINEER, CATIA, DWF and many more. Updates are associative with changes to the Inventor model.

This easy-to-use product captured all the necessary commands in two small tabs and a marking menu.
You can easily change the viewing angle by clicking on the face, edge or corner of the View Cube, and all the typical viewing CAD commands located in the upper right corner of the User Interface.

Exploded views can easily be generated by using the Auto Explode command or by selecting components by simply pushing and pulling them to the desired location. Create new Snapshots by right-clicking, then by clicking on the snapshot command to add to your storyboard on the lower portion of the screen. You can create simple callout notes just by right-clicking and selecting the object lines to connect the arrowhead. Most of the manipulation and annotating tools are only a right-click away. If you don’t know what these commands are, simply put your mouse over an icon command, and the help menu will come up.



Set the background image to solid, gradient or a picture by going to the View tab, Appearance, then Background. You can go back or forward to each snapshot on the storyboard by simply clicking them, or you can animate the whole storyboard.

Once you have generated all the necessary views, annotations, appearances and animation sequences needed on your storyboard, you can now publish to a wide range of interactive, animated, or static formats such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe PDF, PNG, JPG, GIF, Adobe Flash, AVI, DWF, and DWFx. Again, updates are associative with changes to the Inventor model.

Below is an example of Autodesk Inventor Publisher to Powerpoint.

This page last edited on Monday, February 14, 2011