New to the Forum I have questions

[randy.vannostrand]

Hello,

I have fumbled around the forum for years with poor results. I have used Autodesk products since 1985 with only a few short breaks during that time. Last year I made the jump from Mechanical Desktop to Inventor, again with mixed results.

I think I understand the motivation Autodesk had for transitioning from AutoCAD but with roots in board drafting I miss the 2D features that AutoCAD possessed. I know there are some left in the Inventor product but not all. Since I dream AutoCAD shortcuts and commands it took quite some effort to get over the hump to productivity in the new package. I took an introductory class and then barged along to production of large and very complex assemblies without fully understanding pitfalls that a little knowledge and a lot of energy on my part could experience. My assemblies had massive issues with Adaptivity links and missing constraints. I spent a week that I could not afford because of deadlines, working with my reseller to debug my assemblies so that I could produce drawing sheets with exploded views.

I am transitioning out of working predominantly with Autodesk products to a new role where I handle a variety of flavors of 3D models and translate them through Polytrans to SoftImage XSI for rendering and animation. Most of our design and animation work is with Autodesk products and my lengthy experience with them gives me an advantage when assemblies need to be tweaked.

The Inventor software has powerful animation and visualization tools that I think could augment the Interactive Training that we are producing. While XSI can render animations in record time while handling millions of polygons, give startlingly realistic characteristics including shadows and textures and do complex character animations, Inventor's animations have advantages of their own.

My current quest is to become proficient with that portion of Inventors visualization toolbox and get suggestions from power users as to how to avoid future pitfalls with Inventor. If the forum and its moderators can help I would be eternally grateful.

Thanks,

Randy Van Nostrand
Dynetics Visualization and Animation Group
Huntsville, AL
(Formerly Senior Technical Illustrator)

P.S., I taught an AUGI class in 2003 that described my method of producing Technical Illustrations using AutoCAD and Adobe Illustrator.

[BrenBren]

I would check out the Autodesk Manufacturing Community

Also, look into asking questions in the Inventor Forums