Inventor 2017.3

Inventor 2017.3 is here, delivering fixes, updates, and feature enhancements. Just like R2, this is only available for subscription customers.

R3 piggybacks on the updates provided in Inventor 2017 R2. No new functionality, but time-saving enhancements. Some of these updates will make you question how you ever lived without them.

General

  • Measure Enhancements
  • Crossing window selecting of closed profiles
  • 3D PDF enhancement

Want to restart the Measure command? Just click in the graphics windows. Wishing for dual units (Foot – Architectural)? Your wish is granted.

Inventor 2017 R3 Dual Units on Measure

How about using a crossing window to select multiple (closed) profiles? Boom… you can now. This is integrated into extrude, revolve, sweep, coil, chamfer, and fillet.

Inventor 2017 R3 Crossing for Features

3D PDF creation is “significantly” faster and supports View Representation colour overrides.

Sketches

  • Easier tangency selection
  • Redefinable projected sketch references
  • Auto Project enhancements
  • New Look At App Option updates
  • 3D Sketch mini-toolbar
  • Convert Sketch text to geometry

Inventor 2017 R2 introduced the double-click-select-tangent-faces workflow. Inventor 2017.3 expands this workflow into the sketch Project Geometry feature. With Project Geometry active, double-click a face or edge and all tangent connected objects are selected and projected.

Projected References are no longer lost when you redefine the sketch plane. This applies to all types including projected, cut edge, and cross-part reference.

Inventor 2017 R3 Redefine Sketch

When dimensioning or adding constraints, selecting a plane perpendicular to the sketch is now projected automatically. Previously you had to manually project the plane.

The Application Options (Sketch tab) expands the “Look at sketch plane on sketch creation” setting. The new options provide the ability to now toggle the option separately for part and assembly documents.

Inventor 2017 R3 Application Options

The 3D Sketch environment got a bit of loving with the introduction of mini-toolbars. This brings the user interface (UI) up to par with the other part modeling environments.

Got text in a sketch and wish it was sketched geometry instead? Well, have no fear, Inventor 2017.3 provides a new right-click Convert to Geometry feature. This new feature converts text to sketch geometry like lines and arcs. The converted geometry is NOT associative to the original text.

Inventor 2017 R3 Convert Text

Analyze Interference

Analyze Interference provides many new enhancements. This includes the new Treat subassemblies as components option which when enabled ignores the interferences within sub-assemblies.

The results continue to show information about each interference but now includes options to filter the results by interference type. Interference can be ignored (or un-ignored) by right-clicking on it within the list. This also includes an option to ignore all interference volumes equal to or smaller than the selected interference.

Inventor 2017 R3 Interference Updates

A tooltip appears on mismatched threads, highlighting four interference types: misaligned, non-matching thread designation, mismatched left / right threads, and non-matching thread lengths.

If you copy the results, the interference type is included in a new Note column.

 

Guided Tutorial Author

You now have the ability to publish your own tutorials, sharing them privately within your firm or publically to whoever wants to use them. [I’m going to do a deep dive into this at a later time]

 

BIM Content

Inventor has had Building Information Modeling (BIM) features built into it for quite a few releases.

Inventor 2017 R3 provides a new workflow to prepare your Inventor models for use as BIM Content via Configurator 360.

Autodesk Revit uses the OmniClass 2006 product classifications and codes, so Inventor’s OmniClass selections have been expanded to the same.

 

 

Feature image R3 by daniel zimmel