Within Inventor 2017 the area with the biggest changes is the Presentation environment. The Presentation (IPN) had remained mostly untouched within Inventor, until the 2016 version, and Inventor 2017 presentations deliver further workflow improvements for building exploded presentations and other types of assembly instructional views. For those with exposure to Inventor Publisher, you will find a lot of similarities between it and the changes to Inventor 2017.

If you plan on moving to Inventor 2017 from the 2015 version (or older) you will want to start with our look at the Presentation changes within Inventor 2016.

Inventor 2017 Presentations

The enhancements to the Presentation environment can be summarized into two buckets… snapshots and the storyboard. Take comfort in knowing that all your existing presentations (IPNs) will migrate fully within 2017. Exploded views are converted to snapshots, animations to storyboards, and tweaks are preserved.

The initial steps really haven’t changed, as you start by creating a new IPN and selecting the assembly to use as the base model. [One thing I don’t like is there’s no way to pick an already open assembly]. Each presentation contains scenes, each scene is based on the source model (and its representations). The scene contains Snapshots, that are captured views used to generate imagery and drawings, and Storyboards which are your road maps of the animations.

The new Presentation environment within Inventor 2017 is going to need a series of posts to do it justice, In the spirit of “What’s New” this is just a summary of the new features and functionality.

Telling a Story with the Storyboard

The intention of Storyboards is to layout your animations, however, it really becomes the visual tool for working with your presentations. Storyboards are the collection of actions positioned along the animation timeline. The listed actions can be modified and moved directly within the storyboard and your animation previewed by playing the animation. Actions include move & rotate component, component visibility / opacity, and camera position. The Storyboard can be published as a video.

The Storyboard has two areas, the Scratch Zone and your Animation Play Zone (what I’m calling it). Use the Scratch Zone to set initial settings, things not time-dependent. To create an action, first move the playhead to the desired ending position (within the storyboard) and then create the action.

Tweaks are very similar to assembly constraints as they are used to control positions of components within the presentation. Tweaks are the amount of offset (movement or rotation) you want between components in your exploded views. Tweaks are listed in the browser as they always have been, but are also now saved as actions in your animation timeline. Component visibility & opacity are now also stored as actions in the timeline. This makes it significantly easier to manage the transition between states.

Camera settings are not saved automatically, but when you select Capture Camera. The captured camera position becomes an action listed in the timeline.

When satisfied with your animation publish it to video (AVI and WMV) or to a raster image (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF).