Welcome two new Autodesk development blogs

I think it's always a good thing when a knowledge-based community gets bigger and the sources more prolific.

So I'd like to point out two new blogs by Autodesk development experts:

• The Building Coder by Jeremy Tammik, focusing on Revit development
• Mod the Machine by Brian Ekins, focusing on Inventor development

I'm a veteran of a good number of training classes and seminars of both of these gentlemen, and they should be a great addition to the CAD development blogging ecosystem.

If you ever get a chance to meet Brian, you have to ask him to show you one of the more simple but mind-bending demos... I spent years looking at Inventor drawings of 3D parts and assemblies - and one day he shows me a simple application which rotates the view of the drawing in 3D (normally you can only pan/zoom in a "2D" drawing). But it turns out that the "2D" drawing was 3D all along - all of a sudden you could see the 3D parts that were "behind" the 2D drawing, titleblock, etc. Very weird and somewhat psychodelic for people in the CAD world, at least (CAD drawings are supposed to be like digital paper, right?).

-Matt

The Ribbon UI comes to Inventor

I was at the Autodesk Developer Network Manufacturing DevCamp last week, and one of the interesting things I saw was Autodesk's new Ribbon User Interface for Inventor.

While I haven't been wild about the AutoCAD 2009 Ribbon UI, I really like the way that they've implemented this for Inventor. Something about the way they organized it - and the way that you can still use the keyboard shortcuts works nicely. Also the way that you can easily drop into and out of sketch mode more transparently is nice. Perhaps it's because Inventor is fundamentally more structured in terms of contextual menus than AutoCAD (where you can really do any command at any time) - whereas in Inventor you're definitely in Part mode, Assembly mode and drawing mode (etc).

Why should we like Ribbons?

• Ribbons group tasks together logically
• Ribbons make obscure functions more "visible" - commands which are buried in menus and rarely see the light of day for regular users will be used more ("Discoverable", I think they call it).

Available Now

Rather than doing like AutoCAD, where it was released in the 2009 version (a suprise for those who weren't involved in the beta program) - the Inventor team is releasing a "Technology Preview" in the middle of the 2009 version.

You can "safely" sample the functionality and provide feedback by downloading the "extended version" of Inventor, which runs happily side-by-side with regular Inventor.

While they've done some work to have 3rd Party add-ins start working automatically (depending on how you've setup your add-in) - I anticipate that there will still be some amount of trouble on that front. The challenge will be - will customers like it so much that they'll use it in production (in which case the add-ins will have to be updated NOW to support production, rather than waiting for Inventor 2010).

In any case - I'm impressed with how well it's implemented. They obviously put a lot of thought into it.

Video:

Download

http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/inventor2009_ui/

Autodesk Introduces Inventor LT

In somewhat of a suprise move (at least to me - apparently I'm out of the loop), Autodesk has introduced a "Limited" version of it's 3D Mechanical Inventor software. Conceptually - I suppose it should work much like AutoCAD vs. AutoCAD LT, with LT being the choice of users who don't really need the full capabilities of the Inventor software.

What's missing? well, from a developer's perspective - everything! Similar to the restrictions on AutoCAD LT, Inventor LT will not allow any 3rd party development to work with it.

But beyond that restriction - it's a pretty good deal (especially while it's free). If nothing else, you get full part modeling support, rendering, DWF publishing, translation (including UGNX, Parasolid and Pro/E Granite import and export).

Extreme Architecture with Inventor and Revit: You too can be Frank Gehry

One of the most interesting presentations I saw at AU this year was Autodesk's Lisa Brady, showing how Autodesk Inventor (a primarily manufacturing tool) could be used with Revit to generate both complex architectural massing shapes - as well as everyday content.

The key is the use of the ACIS SAT file as an intermediate format - as well as Revit's ability to take all kinds of massing elements and build walls and curtain systems on any face. While Revit is capable of modeling these kinds of things natively - it's certainly far, far harder than what you can do with Inventor.

See my example below:

Content Creation
Lisa also showed how to create Revit Family Content in Inventor... The trick is again to create a 3D SAT file of a part or assembly. In the case of an assembly, the SAT file made a trip thru AutoCAD - because Inventor has a strange layering convention, you need to change it to a set of DWG solids in order to place the solids onto layers. The layers, in turn, are used inside of Revit to assign different materials in the family.