Many of you may already be familiar with Inventor or at least may have seen it before. It remains a very powerful tool for 3D parametric design and what Autodesk are terming as a Digital Prototyping solution.

It has recently been announced that an LT version is to be released in the UK bundled with AutoCAD LT, this will be shipping very shortly.  I have now spend a few days looking at the functionality and limitations of this product both for the manufacturing and Construction industries.

Basically, Inventor LT is intended as an entry level 3D parametric design system that will hopefully convert the people and companies that think 3D Design is difficult, time consuming or financially not cost effective. It is suitable for the smallest of companies with the occasional need for 3D design up to multi national organisations that need to supplement their existing design solutions with a parametric design system.

Inventor LT shares the same core technology for part design and 2D design as its bigger brother but does not include assembly modelling or sheet metal design. It does include the Inventor Studio module and the AEC exchange module for creating components that can be consumed by the Revit  suit of products as well as AutoCAD Architecture and

AutoCAD MEP.

In the above image I have used Inventor LT to create a parametric phone case and then used the draft analysis tool and surface analysis tools to check cross sections and for imperfections within the solids surfaces. The major benefit of this workflow is the feature history which you can use to edit and modify the design and be confident that the 2D drawing views and annotations will update automatically.

Above you can see the powerful tools within Inventor LT to create and annotate drawing views including hole tables and the ability to plan and show tolerances on dimensions. Many manufacturing and design companies will benefit from the ability to have a few seats of Inventor LT to complement their existing Inventor seats. It is certainly a more affordable way of increasing your design capability.

I also tried a few examples around Architectural design and had a go at producing something to resemble the Birds nest stadium. This was a fairly quick design that took just over one hour and allows full parametric control over the form and the 3D sketches and sweeps. This could be imported into a Revit massing family to complete the design.

Here I have produced a set of 2D drawings and a rendering from Inventor Studio for a plastic casing for a hair dryer. The above drawing is in DWG format, a great feature of Inventor.

Finally you can use Inventor LT to create content for the Revit platform, AutoCAD Architecture and AutoCAD MEP in the adsk file format. Inventor LT gives the ability to create all the necessary connectors for Ducts, Pipes and other MEP related equipment.

For more information and webinars click the following link. I will be running a series of seminars for Manufacturing and the construction industry over the web!

http://www.excitech.co.uk/news/inventor_lt_mechanical_web_seminar.asp

LawrenceH

Autodesk’s top selling 3D mechanical design software, Inventor, is soon to be available as an LT version that is bundled with AutoCAD LT. Autodesk Inventor LT will deliver powerful 3D parametric part design, automated DWG drawing views and the ability to import and export to a variety of file formats such as CATIA, Solidworks and Pro Engineer as well as full DWG support. The AEC exchange capability is also included for transferring models to Revit and AutoCAD Architecture and AutoCAD MEP.

This will provide a great opportunity for those of you that want to explore the capabilities of parametric single part design and others who already have Inventor and need a cost effective method of creating and editing parts and producing drawings.

For more information check the following link from Autodesk

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/invlt10_broch_overview_us.pdf