“Un-Boxing” Inventor 2021

Product un-boxing has been a fad on YouTube for a while now, so today, I’ll be un-boxing Autodesk Inventor 2021 and sharing What’s New for this release.  Granted there’s no physical box for me to open and reveal what’s inside, but there’s plenty of new features and enhancements for 2021 for me to unpack.

General Enhancements:

• Microsoft Excel is no longer needed. Inventor functions (i.e. iParts, iAssembly) no longer depend on Microsoft Excel unless the creation or editing of these features is done through the spreadsheet editing feature
• Commands/functions of “Bend”, “Coil”, “Combine”, “Split”, “Decal”, “Delete Face”, “Thicken/Offset”, and “Copy Object” have been switched over to the new properties panel interface
• Configuration 360 is no longer part of the Inventor installation and is downloaded now through the Inventor Exchange App store
• Existing lighting styles of Light Theme IBL and Light Theme, non-IBL based have been renamed to “Default IBL” and  “Default Lights”
• The “Tolerance Analysis” function has been added to the “Annotate”, “Design”, and “Inspect” ribbon tab for easier access to this add-on (which is only available through Product Design & MFG Collection)

AnyCAD (Interface) Enhancements:

Part Mode Enhancements:

• Ability to select multiple solids/faces/edges in a multi-lump part file
• When the option (Application Options or through the Inventor model browser) to display extended information after feature node is selection, functions as creating user defined work plane/axis/points and mirroring options now include extended information within the browser
• The unwrap function now allows the name in its property dialog to be changed, ability to select multiple planer holes to be rigid, and the results alignment to the model and standard origin work planes

Assembly Mode Enhancements:

• In positional representations, the remove override contextual menu now supports selecting multiple override constraints and removing the over-ride
• In express mode, you now have the ability to switch to a different iAssembly member
• For Frame Analysis, options of Automatic, Frontal, Skyline, Sparse/Sparse M and Multi-thread have been added to solver tab to provide additional capabilities

Drawing Mode Enhancements:

For additional information, check out the Inventor 2021 “What’s New” section of the on-line Inventor help.

Until next time…