Manufacturing keynotes at AU 2008
Published Wed 11 Feb 2009
Experience Manufacturing followed the manufacturing presentations where a host of new technologies were previewed.
While the first days’ proceedings at Autodesk University featured a general keynote session, the second day’s activities split into the various vertical industry groups and of course, our concentration for that day was the Manufacturing stream.
As ever, Autodesk’s Vice President of Manufacturing Solutions Division, Buzz Kross, took to the stage to welcome the assembled masses to the event and to introduce the guest speaker, Burt Rutan. For those that don’t know the name, Rutan is the owner of Scaled Composites, an aerospace company based in the Mojave Desert. While he has many achievements and world firsts, Rutan and his team is best known for winning the $10 million X-Prize for the first privately funded spacecraft to enter the realm of space twice in two weeks. The core technology developed to help achieve this amazing feat has since been licensed by Richard Branson for his Virgin Galactic enterprise, due to launch next year.
Rutan is always a popular speaker with engineering-focussed crowds. After all, this guy builds spaceships - it doesn’t get much better than that. But more than this, there’s a real sense of adventure, of excitement and of pioneering spirit embodied in a man that does look like a true old school hero. Rutan had many wise words, but perhaps the most interesting was that true innovation or technological breakthrough never happens in comfortable times. It’s always when the chips are down that the breakthroughs happen, whether that’s due to war or economic pressure as we’re facing now. With space being his driving factor, the perfect example he used was the Cold War and how that accelerated the race for the moon and development of nuclear technology to name but a few.
Following Rutan, Autodesk’s Senior Director of Product Management, Andrew Anagnost gave a fascinating glimpse of what Autodesk is working on, both for very near future release and some a little further in the future. Of course, there’s the age old caveat that these products might never actually make it to market, but with that, let’s have a look.
Inventor Fusion
If you’ve read our news pages this issue, you’ll already be aware of Inventor Fusion. The Manufacturing community got to see this in a little more depth and we had a personal demonstration later on that day. It is very early days for Inventor Fusion, but the potential is clear: that Autodesk is looking at a way to integrate dynamic, history-less modelling with traditional parametrics technologies - hence the name. 
For those that aren’t up to speed with the latest advances in the 3D modelling world, last year two dynamic modelling-based products were released by competitors of Autodesk and this kicked off something of a whirlwind. Suddenly the world went dynamic or direct modelling mad. The concept is that instead of using history-based methods to construct geometry (as you currently do within Inventor), new tools are used to drag and drop models into shape, and one doesn’t have to worry about history, as there isn’t any. This makes things much easier for basic modelling tasks. Inventor Fusion looks to be Autodesk’s answer to this market shift.
What’s interesting is that it looks like Autodesk’s development is going to be done in public to some extent, with Autodesk Labs probably being the host for the public test versions. From what we saw and although it’s liable to change, this could be the most intriguing thing to happen to with Inventor for quite some time. You can sign up for more details at
Design for injection moulding
Autodesk has been building up an interesting set of tools for the design of injection moulded plastic parts and then extending that out further into mould design. Along with the acquisition of Moldflow last year, this means that there’s an interesting set of tools brewing. Autodesk demoed the process, from part design, through core and cavity creation, gating design, and then into mould-based creation and of course, documentation. The plastic part design tools are already on the Labs web-site, and it looks like Autodesk has some very interesting plans for the future in this area.
Technical illustration
Autodesk appears to be working on a documentation/technical publications application. Whether that’s standalone or within Inventor, isn’t too clear yet. From what we saw this focuses on tools for component explosion, manipulation and view creations as typically required need to create disassembly/assembly or service or instruction manuals (or with the animation tools, output to video). Technical Illustration is just part of that documentation workflow and bottleneck, but this looks to give you smart tools that let you re-purpose your existing data into illustrations pretty nicely, without too much complexity.
Design review/presentation
Autodesk has been selling its Showcase product for a while now (see our ten step guide on page 28), but the real-time rendering, visualisation and presentation tool’s adoption has been largely focussed on the automotive market to date. A version tailored for the Inventor user community was demonstrated to show how quick it was to load data, apply materials and use it for design presentation or review.
Sketching for Mac OSX
The penultimate demo showed off a conceptual design tool that started out by presenting some intelligent sketching tools that follow the interface of SketchBook Pro, but with some serious additions. The system appears to be incredibly powerful when creating smooth curves, with a very intuitive interaction method that allows the user to refine curves with strokes of a mouse or pen (it’s more suited to tablet-based use).
What was really impressive was when the curves were then flipped into 3D and interacted with (in a similarly intuitive method) a 3D curve network was created that looked like it could be used to create surfaces. The system doesn’t have a name (so Autodesk says), but from what was shown, it looks to be an incredible tool for the industrial design crowd and anyone involved in concept development. And yes, it was running natively on Apple’s OS X operating system - which combined with the recent release of other Autodesk apps on the Apple platform indicates something of a trend.
