Nothing revolutionary but the evolution continues with lots of little enhancements.
Autodesk Inventor Professional is a 3D CAD system used for 3D mechanical design, simulation, visualization, and documentation. The first version shipped over 20 years ago. Time sure does fly!
Packed with customer-driven updates, Autodesk Inventor 2024 helps speed up design workflows, reduce repetitive tasks, and improve experiences. All so you can focus more time on design and innovation.
As a product that is 20-plus years old, the focus is no longer solely on picks-and-clicks and new features. Autodesk focuses on rounding out and polishing existing features. Inventor 2024 includes over 100 enhancements based on customer feedback and suggestions.
This is not to say that there are no new features. However, the new features stay on task of using Inventor to create detailed digital prototypes of products and machinery. Many of the new features are in documentation and communication, in both 2D and 3D. You will also find enhancements to speed up and improve your workflows.
Design Intent
Inventor has tools for capturing manufacturing processes. This includes sheet metal, frame design, cable and harness, presentations, and the new Finish feature.
Finish
Assigning appearances to parts and features is not new. What is new is combining appearance with manufacturing details. Use the new Finish feature to specify the appearance and the manufacturing process. For example, material coatings, surface finishes, heat treatment and paint.
All applied finishes are listed in the new Finishes browser folder. From the browser folder, you can reorder, rename, suppress or delete them. As a feature, Inventor captures the suppressed state in the model states (for configuration).
Each Finish feature setting has a parameter with a corresponding unique name in the “Finish Parameters” category in the Parameters dialog. You can export these parameters. This export is not a typical export process and rather than creating an external file, exported parameters show as iProperties (metadata).
In Drawings, a new “Parameters – Finish” category is available with Text and Leader Text. This enables the use of the Finish information in drawing notes. These parameters automatically update with changes in the modeling environment. This enhances your drawing by adding manufacturing process information to the documentation.
Parameter Enhancements
On the topic of parameters. Inventor 2024 adds a new Hardness unit type. This is used by the Finish command but can also be used on its own.
You can now export both Text and Boolean (true/false) values from the Parameters dialog (as custom iProperties). You can then retrieve the iProperties for use in the drawing environment or in 3D annotations.
Mark Improvements
Introduced in Inventor 2023, you can use Mark to create laser marking, etching, and engraving type features in your parts. Marks appear in 2D and 3D. Inventor recognizes the mark geometry, putting it on its own layer when exporting to DXF or DWG.
What’s new with Mark in Inventor 2024?
- Use non-coplanar sketches to define the mark sketch geometry.
- Wrap or project the sketch to a non-planar face.
Use Project for complex faces and Wrap for simple curved faces. Project and Wrap are the same as with Emboss and Decal.
Fix, Fit, Finish
Inventor is a “powerful blend” of parametric, direct, freeform, and rules-based design. The fix, fit and finish enhancements improve existing workflows, fix issues, and embed modern experiences.
With this release, Color Scheme Settings can be set for drawing sketch elements. Until now, it was difficult to work with elements if their color conflicted with the sheet color setting. The new Sketch options allow the color of sketch elements to be set for the drawing environment.
GPU Ray Tracing (Pre-Release edition) now supports rendering with image-based lighting backgrounds and rendering thread appearances. The dialog has been tweaked to better describe the purposes of the options.
Sketch canceling is now available for all 2D and 3D sketch workflows. Upon starting or editing a sketch, use the new Cancel Sketch to exit sketching, dismissing all changes. This is the equivalent of undoing all actions back to the creation of or start of editing a sketch.
If editing the sketch via the feature breadcrumb, the feature edit is terminated by canceling the sketch.
Improved Profile Detection—when specifying face in Sheet Metal, closed-loop detection makes it easier to select geometry from a sketch, especially in situations where multiple profiles are overlapping.
Sketch Pattern performance—this is a general improvement for sketch-driven patterns, not only for compute but also for highlighting a sketch-driven pattern occurrence when moving your mouse in browser view.
Section Views
The Section View definition now persists in the model design view representation. You might be asking, So what? It means you no longer need to recreate section views to adjust their settings. As opposed to removing the section, you suppress the section, making it available for quick restoration later.
On top of this, Autodesk cleaned up the interface by putting all section view commands and options directly in the mini toolbar, which is conveniently located in the graphics window. This results in a reduced amount of mouse clicks and mouse travel to apply and alter sections.
To aid performance, section end caps now (by default) turn off when you are dragging the section view plane.
Component Patterning Enhancements
When creating Rectangular Patterns in Inventor 2024, you can now select revolved, cylindrical, or conical faces to define the direction of the pattern. Inventor uses the face axis to set the direction.
The new Circular Pattern Positioning Method (Incremental and Fitted) brings the component pattern feature in line with feature and sketch patterning. Use Incremental to set the spacing between instances and Fitted to set the total angle covered by the pattern.
Tube and Pipe
Before Inventor 2024, only 45- and 90-degree elbows were available for rigid pipe runs. This made for a less-than-ideal process of including custom-built parts. Now, with the new Custom Elbows option, you can add elbows of any angle.
Start with the Tube & Pipe style, enable the new Custom Elbows option, and set the family to use.
When using the style setup with custom elbows, you can set the elbow angle. Do this by dragging the curved arrow manipulator glyph or entering the desired angle. When the angle is 45 or 90, Inventor places a standard rigid elbow. With other angles, the route populates with a custom elbow.
Derive Enhancements
Inventor’s Derive process allows you to simplify components. You do this either for performance or to protect intellectual property when sharing your models with others.
Prior to 2024, creating bounding boxes of components oriented to the origin of the part. This could cause bounding boxes to be bigger than the physical envelope.
The new Oriented Minimum Bounding Box option produces more realistic representations as it finds the smallest enclosing box. It is not dependent on the direction of the origin or of any feature in the model.
When replacing components with envelopes (“All in One Envelope”), use the new Edge values to adjust the size of the envelope. Additionally, new options create read-only Edge A, B and C parameters in the simplified file. Use these parameters for driving other features.
Interoperability
The past few releases of Inventor have seen a focus on improving the exchange of data with Revit and Fusion 360. This continues in Inventor 2024 with the addition of sending a part directly to Fusion 360 for manual Inspection tasks.
In addition, Inventor now prompts you when you open a Fusion Export link and the Inventor and Fusion models are out of sync. You can now update the Fusion 360 model prior to opening it.
To streamline the process of exporting drawing data, Inventor 2024 adds a new Sheet Content Only option. When this option is enabled, the export includes only the content inside or partially inside the sheet borders.
Translator Updates
- New options to include UCS on import of both JT and STEP files.
- Performance improvements when opening OBJ file.
- Added support for importing Solid Edge 2023 and importing/exporting Parasolid v35.
Documentation and Communication
What good is your design if you cannot document it properly or communicate to those who need to build it?
Revision Clouds
A long-time inclusion with the software development kit (SDK) add-in, Revision Cloud has transitioned into a “full-fledged” object and feature. Although part of the SDK for several years, this is still the first implementation within Inventor. This means there is a lot of room to grow. If you are familiar with revision clouds in other applications, like AutoCAD, you may find Inventor’s version adequate but lacking bells and whistles.
What are Revision Clouds? These are closed cloud-shaped objects consisting of arc segments. Use these when reviewing or marking up drawings to call attention to portions of the drawing.
As this is a drawing-specific tool, you create Revision Clouds by picking points on the sheet to define the boundary. The cloud previews as you select the points. Like with other sketch objects, inferences and constraints are active as you are creating the object. Double-click the last point or right-click and select Create to complete the process and create the shape.
Tip: Picking a point on a view to start the Revision Cloud associates the object with the view. It will adjust as the view changes. The cloud object will also copy with a copied view.
To make changes, click and drag the cloud to move it. You can also click and drag a vertex to adjust the position of the point. You can also drag a point over another to merge the two points.
Revision Clouds appear in the sheet but also within the browser. Right-click on the object (in canvas) or on the browser node for a menu of options to use when working with the object.
- Use Copy to duplicate the object. This is only available when the cloud is not associated with a view.
- Delete to remove the object from the drawing.
- Add vertex to insert a new point into the object.
- Invert to reverse the cloud’s direction.
- Delete vertex to remove a point.
- Edit sketch to enter the sketch environment. Use this to make changes to the object with sketch features.
Drawings
You can now delete Origin Indicators (yeah!). If dimensions use the origin indicator, those dimensions will also be deleted. A prompt alerts you to the dimension deletion prior to the action.
The Sheet Name is now available as a Sheet Property to use in text.
With Inventor 2024, add edge symbols to your drawings based on the ISO 13715:2019 standard. As it is styles based, Edge Symbol is now a choice within the Style and Standard Editor.
Model Based Definition (MBD)
MBD is not new to Inventor, as it has been available for several years. MBD conveys nongeometric information in the 3D model as opposed to a 2D drawing view.
What is new in Inventor 2024 is that all 3D annotations now appear within a folder in the model browser. This allows for group operations like hiding all the annotations in one right-click operation.
The Envelope Requirement Modifier is now available for hole notes and dimensions. With feature control annotations, the All over modifier is now available.
In the drawing environment, you can extract 3D annotations from the parts contained in an assembly file. Previously, you could only extract the 3D annotations from part drawing views.
Other enhancements:
- Thread Notes highlight all faces related to the feature.
- Weld symbols are available as 3D annotations; they are no longer just within the weldment environment.
- Inventor provides default values with flatness and profile of a surface.
- The datum target browser node shows the target size.
- 1:5 is now a default scale.
General Enhancements
Here are the rest of the updates for 2024:
- The Guided Tutorials now use the same interaction elements as the Inventor Home experience.
- Shared Views is now panel driven.
- Inventor Studio now renders images up to 16K x 16K resolution.
- it is now possible to set perspective with ortho faces as the default view setting.
- the J key is the default shortcut key for placing joints in assemblies, weldments and dynamic simulation.
- New iLogic functions allow Inventor to check out, get files, and search Autodesk Vault.
Long gone are the days of revolutionary new features in Inventor. However, Autodesk continues to use spit and polish to improve existing features and add new ones to improve workflows.
