Autodesk Inventor: Master tool of satan!
I’m in Inventor training this week. Autodesk Inventor, to be exact, Autdesk’s second attempt to compete with real 3d products. Their first attempt, Mechanical Desktop, was a failure of biblical proportions, and frankly, this should be too. I am stuck with this, our company has chosen to go down this dead end, and I have to try to make it work. Ayone out there who needs a decent 3d design tool, look ANYWHERE but Autodesk. Save yourself!
You have my sympathies — even though I have no clue.
M
Dude, if your company ever looks at using “vault” from Autodesk, run, do not walk, to the nearest exit.
I have had to write tools for CAD drafters so I end up working with the Autodesk API’s quit often. I don’t know anything about how to draft etc. I’m just a developer but from a developers view Autodesk blows giant monkey chunks. The ObjectARX API for AutoCAD is bad enough but the Inventor API makes it look like a dream in comparason. It is primarily all COM calls from .Net and it sucks so bad it’s unreal. I feel your pain I won’t develop for Inventor unless it’s an absolute do it or loose my job situation. I hate Autodesk products with a passion!
I am trying to find more specifically why Inventor is a dead end? What are “real 3d products” and where does Autodesk fall short? I love AutoCAD! How can the same company fall so short with a 3d product?
Autocad is a good product if all you need to do is make 2d pictures. Autodesk Inventor is a more-or-less functional full 3d product, which is actually solids based, but pales in comparison to the other major player in it’s price range, SolidWorks. Solidworks in 1995 was greatly superior to the Inventor of today. Like to make drawings? Solidworks helps you to make a full 3d model, and when you’re done, so is the drawing. It automatically generates the drawing for you.
I second SolidWorks. Every place I have ever written programs for the engineers preferred SolidWorks to anything else. If they couldn’t get that they would use Microstation before they would use AutoCAD.