中文名: Autodesk Inventor Professional 11 英文版英文名: Autodesk Inventor Professional 11別名: AIP資源格式: 光盤鏡像版本: 11制作發行: Autodesk地區: 美國簡介:
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While it’s still a couple of months away from full customer shipping, Al Dean and Martyn Day managed to uncover some of the new features of Autodesk’ flagship 3D product development application. With its annual release program now a regular item on the CAD calendar, Autodesk is going through the final stages of beta testing its forthcoming releases. So far, Autodesk has consistently stuck around the March time-frame for its mass product launch and this year seems like no exception, give or take a month. The forthcoming release of Inventor, version 11, was widely rumoured to have improved surfacing, together with the wiring up of the final parts of its MechSoft ‘functional design’ acquisition. As the official launch comes near, and with developers and beta testers giving rave reports, we give our insights as to what to expect in what looks like a major update.
1) Large assemblies asssembly configurations
Handling of large assemblies is something that’s always a concern with all mainstream CAD vendors. Back in the good old days when RAM and hard-drive capacity were both measured in MB, people learnt to work with the minimum data required to define a product. As things have progressed, the ability to easily define every single feature and function within a product model has become a reality. That said, even now, with the ability to pretty much have unlimited computing resources, assembly handling is still a problem and one that won’t always be solved by throwing more powerful hardware at it. So, with this in mind, Inventor R11 appears to have a number of tools that allow you to work with the incredibly detailed datasets that are now common. Much of this appears to have been done through changes to assembly display and interaction. We have been told that users can define the level of detail or feature groupings that allow you to load only the data you need to work with. This allows the inspection and manipulation of product structure without having the geometry overhead. We don’t know exactly how big or fast you will be able to with large assemblies but it will improve the performance of assemblies you can already load and should enable you to load assemblies that are currently too big.
The Mechanical and Component calculators and the fittings libraries for Tube and Piping have been consolidated into the Content Centre, making definition and modification, as well as learning, much easier. Of course another way of making lighter work of large assemblies is to make your CAD system 64-bit. Unlike SolidWorks, who has just announced a 64-bit version of SolidWorks 2006 (see page 6 of the news), Inventor 11 will still be based on 32-bit code. This means that a single Inventor session will still only be able to address 4GB memory, whereas a 64-bit CAD application will be able to address infinitely more. Despite the new large model handling capabilities, some ‘power’ Inventor users may still be disappointed to learn that Autodesk has not yet made the 64-bit move, which would give them extra capacity to work with much larger models (hardware permitting). However, Autodesk does have plans to introduce a 64-bit version in the near future, as well as including optimisations to enable the software to run quicker on the new generation of dual core workstations.
Elsewhere, on the subject of assemblies, Autodesk has introduced new functionality called Assembly configurations whereby you can create full product variants and manage them within a single file, using a table to drive part and feature parameters, suppression states and such. Of course, this looks to be backed up with tools that allow you to fully document these variants in a 2D drawing, but perhaps just as importantly, manage their deployment within your products using the data management tools (Vault and ProductStream).
2) Functional design
As expected, Inventor 11 builds on the work done in the last few release cycles that has seen Autodesk flesh out its ‘Functional Design’ concept. This is the move to take the operation of a 3D product modelling system towards the ability to define a product’s function and form using standard design and engineering terminology, rather than building unintelligent geometry and dimension-based representations. So, instead of defining your products with a series of profiles, modelling features and parametrics, you use the functional requirements, such as performance, size, weight, power consumption, cost, durability etc. Part of the method of implementing this approach is the integration and enhancement of the tools acquired from Mechsoft a year or so ago.
Sneaking a peak at the early alpha code, it’s clear that effort has been put into better integration of these tools into the core Inventor interface. The separate dialogs and methods of accessing those operations, which made their use rather complex in the last release, have now been consolidated. All of the Component and Mechanical Generators (for the likes of bolted/screwed connections, shafts, hubs and bearings, and the intelligent definition and calculation of joints, plates, and bearings etc) are now created and modified with a single dialog, which makes the whole process much more efficient.
Alongside the work on the dialogs, the manner in which you create such components has also changed and has become much more dynamic. This feature was demonstrated subtly at Autodesk University last year on the main stage, with the dynamic preview and placement of bolts and shafts. When you choose a bolt from the Content Centre, the system inserts the basic configuration at your cursor. As you place it into the hole reference point, the system automatically adjusts the size (M2, 3, 4 etc) to suit. You immediately get a dynamic 3D preview, but what is more impressive is that you can grab a handle at the base of the bolt and drag it to the correct size. This isn’t just an arbitrary length, but the system extracts the standard lengths from the Content Centre and steps through them as you adjust the length. You then create the end conditions (to a blind hole or a bolt connection), add the hardware required and you’re away. This looks very, very slick.
The Autodrop tools make assembly building much easier, as standard components are automatically sized and allow you to drag and drop lengths and such, according to standard definitions.
The Tube and Piping tools now allow you to define design-intent based constraints which handle design changes better, without much manual intervention. One thing that’s important to note is that Functional Design is not purely limited to the Engineer’s handbook and related tools, but is being introduced at a core level across the product. For example, within the tube and pipe design module you now define pipe runs based on their route and the relationship between the various controlling entities, rather than dimensions. The result is that changing a lay-out or product configuration won’t bugger up each route and it should handle those changes without much re-routing.
Other functional design related updates are rumoured to impact simulation (more on that shortly) and we have seen a particularly impressive Steel Frame Generator. This allows you to mix and match solid geometry and wireframe, skeletal modelling methods to define a steel structure, then use some specialised tools to create each beam’s form and function. You can even define the volume that you need to enclose and use that as reference geometry.
3) Simulation
Also demonstrated at Autodesk University, one area that’s going to be particularly interesting for those working with mechanisms, or in fact any type of non-static product, is the introduction of dynamic simulation. This is derived from the acquisition of Solid Dynamics late last year. We weren’t expecting to hear of the inclusion of these tools in R11, as the purchase was so recent, but it looks like this functionality will be mainly available in the Professional version of Inventor.
This first iteration will include “Predict dynamic performance peak stresses without building prototypes.” We have been told that you can take an assembly model and carry out dynamic analyses based on real world constraints and incorporate all the usual factors that influence motion. There’s a big library of motion joints with friction, damping and stiffness. From using the Solid Dynamics product in the past, the definition of these can either be done manually with values or via tools that allow you to convert your standard assembly mating conditions into motion simulation constraints – although this process isn’t as slick as it might be, with good reason.
It’s often the case that the mates you’d use to define a static assembly model aren’t necessarily those you’d use for motion simulation – and this is a pan-industry problem rather than something specific to this Solid Dynamics. You can control loads and moments using time-based force functions and the system includes 3D motion visualisation, graphing and report tools. Interestingly, one feature I really liked the idea of was that you can find the points of maximum stress or force transference and have those numbers transferred to the built-in stress analysis tools (the free stuff, not the full Ansys product).
4) Advanced Shape Description
Lets face facts, Inventor has always taken a pounding is in the area of more advanced geometry definition tools. In short, it’s surfacing capabilities have been poor. The last few releases have seen more features drip fed into the system. It’s been known for a long time that R11 has had a lot of energy concentrated in this department and at a very core level and now Inventor will finally find itself as a contender in mould and product design. We have been told that there’s been work done to account for the high-order accuracy of the ShapeManager kernel (based on ACIS) to enhance compatibility with lower accuracy surface data, and slacken off the tolerance (with full user control). What this means is that you can work with a much wider ‘range’ of imported geometry on your own terms and with a lot of control.
We understand that the 3D sketching tools have been enhanced to allow for much greater control over their position, form and relation to other geometry (such as curvature control and the like). To do this, the loft and sweep functions have been rewritten to make their use more efficient and powerful. For example, the loft is now more flexible as you don’t need to have profiles and guide rails intersecting. There are other new functions, such as an enhanced boundary patch that matches surfaces that are either planar in form or match the surrounding geometry on a curvature continuous basis. It’s all powerful stuff.
There are also sightings of a ‘Sculpt tool’ which allows you to perform multiple, trim, extend, patch, sew and healing operations in a single command. Imagine an imported set of trimmed surfaces, all intersecting, and you’re not too sure what’s what. The sculpt tool allows you to define the trimming and cutting parameters and the relationships between each set of faces (what gets cut, what gets deleted, what stays etc) and have the system do the donkey work – you pretty much just choose which is the right resultant model. But that said, it could be easily be used to explore the trimming options for just a few surfaces on an existing solid.
Well, that’s most of the industry chatter that we have picked up about the forthcoming release of Inventor 11. There are bound to be hundreds of other improvements and enhancements but these will have to be seen when the release ships. We also know that Autodesk is working on big improvements to Vault and DWF, which ship with the product. Third party developers are also getting their teeth stuck into the new functionality, with new and updated products set to ship after the product’s availability.
Inventor 11 is a big release for Autodesk. It plugs the gaps in the product’s obvious deficiencies, pushes forward the ‘Functional Design’ concept improving the system’s overall ‘intelligence’, removes some of the limits of assembly size and delivers a really useful dynamic simulation tool. In short, with Inventor 11 Autodesk looks to be raising the bar for the competition.