Autodesk Australia announces a new update to the Autodesk Inventor 2016 launched in April. Designed to enhance collaboration, the new Autodesk Inventor tool, Inventor Connected Design powered by the Autodesk 360 cloud platform, enables fast and easy 3D design reviews between team members anywhere in the world on any device.

Inventor Connected Design is a new technology for linking Inventor to the cloud. Using Autodesk A360, Inventor 2016 users can launch a Design Share collaboration session easily from within Inventor and then capture notes and record the intent behind decisions, while allowing control over sharing of their intellectual property.

Inventor’s cloud-enabled collaboration supports multiple engineering teams to collaborate concurrently across the product development workflow and helps speed the decision making process.

Lance Grow, director of Inventor product design explained that the best of their design authoring tools, data management and secure cloud capabilities have been brought together to dramatically improve collaboration for product development. He added that the new development will allow customers to easily review their designs, collaborate across engineering teams, streamline supply chain communications while using a variety of platforms and enable them to select and preview the design data to be shared, allowing them complete control of their intellectual property.

Inventor Connected Design allows users to collaborate on 3D designs on virtually any device; frequently share designs-in-progress without committing changes or otherwise impacting data management; conduct reviews much more quickly than with traditional methods such as 2D screenshots and/or email; leverage lightweight viewables that allow for easy control over which parts are shared and which are excluded; and automatically manage and track comments from collaborators, providing a central record for each Design Share and associated feedback.

Adding IFC Publishing for the building and construction industry

Inventor has, over the years, added several capabilities that enable building product manufacturers to easily exchange data with Building Information Modelling (BIM) systems. The latest Inventor update adds Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) file format as an export option to facilitate the delivery of 3D mechanical designs for building and construction applications. An open standard for exchanging model information among manufacturing, architecture, engineering, and construction industries, IFC is increasingly being mandated by building owners and government agencies. Inventor now supports IFC in addition to RFA and ADSK export formats.

Image: Inventor Connected Design enables fast, easy 3D design reviews with your team and other project collaborators anywhere, on any device