Autodesk unveils Inventor Fusion tech preview

Autodesk announced that a tech preview of Inventor Fusion, the company's take on the trend toward melding parametric and direct modeling techniques, will be available for download starting tomorrow. The company says this release is the first step toward a full version of Inventor Fusion.

“Our manufacturing customers have told us that direct modeling is opening up new opportunities to accelerate product development. However, they’ve also told us that they don’t see the need for the power and control of history-based parametric modeling going away,” said Robert “Buzz” Kross, senior vice president for the Manufacturing Industry Group at Autodesk. “We’re developing Inventor Fusion technology as part of a larger effort to combine the best of both disciplines to further improve the product design process.”

Inventor Fusion has the potential to be unique among hybrid modelers in that Autodesk is billing the technology as bidirectional, which would allow designers to start with a quick push/pull rough out of a model and then see those changes updated in a parametric feature tree.

The company says it plans to release a second technology preview this fall.

For an in-depth analysis of Autodesk Fusion and its capabilities, see Ralph Grabowski's article "Inside Autodesk Fusion" published in March.
www.inventorfusion.com