How Inventor is Getting Squeezed Between Solidworks and Fusion

Issue #947

 

by Ralph Grabowski Autodesk began work on Inventor as a reaction to the run-away success of Solidworks. Solidworks 95 was self-funded by its programmers as a brand-new, mid-priced (roughly $5,000) parametric MCAD[mechanical CAD] program. A few years after "coming out of nowhere," Solidworks became the best selling Windows-based MCAD program, undercutting the high-end ($10,000+) market of Pro/Engineer, UGS (NX today), and Catia. To this day, it remains such. At the time, Autodesk offered two packages in MCAD: Mechanical Desktop (MDT) for 3D modeling, and Mechanical for 2D detailing. Both were based on AutoCAD. I recall being puzzled that Autodesk did not promote 2D Mechanical more, as it was a very impressive piece of software, even though the AutoCAD engine back then lacked MCAD necessities like constraints and assemblies. Being AutoCAD-based made the 3D MDT a hard sell to non-AutoCAD users.  To compete with the Solidworks juggernaut, Autodesk first tried to buy Solidworks, but lost out to Dassault Systemes. So instead the company launched "Project Rubicon" under the leadership of Robert Kross. His team wrote the new MCAD system from scratch.  Rubicon is the name of a river between Italy and France and became significant in history when in 49BC Gaius Julius Caesar crossed the river from Gaul south into Italy. By leading troops, he broke Roman law, and so irrevocably began a civil war that led him to becoming the dictator of the empire. Autodesk wanted in the same way to irrevocably dominate the mid-priced MCAD market. Project Rubicon became "Inventor," which Autodesk launched in 1999. This was followed by an aggressive schedule of twice-yearly updates to enable the feature set to catch up to Solidworks. At the same time, Autodesk undertook a just-as-aggressive anti-Solidworks marketing campaign of in-their-face advertising and law suits. During those first few years, the Inventor marketing staff maintained a presence outside Solidworks World user events, such as displaying ads on nearby billboards, handing out boxing-motif leaflets, and inviting Solidworks users to Inventor social events. Autodesk targeted Solidworks Corp (and parent Dassault Systemes) with lawsuits over its use of an orange rectangle and the name of a free utility, DWGEditor. (Autodesk lost the orange rectangle suit, and Dassault negotiated a settlement over DWGEditor, replacing it with the hugely successful Draftsight.) Ultimately, this three-pronged Rubicon tactic didn't succeed. Today, analysts think Inventor might be in second or third place after Solidworks and Solid Edge. Well, maybe. We don't really know, as CAD vendors no longer report exact seat numbers. Analysts can only estimate that Inventor sold 24,000 seats last year, and Solidworks 70,000 seats. Financial analyst Jay Vleeschhouwer reports, "By our calculation, Solidworks has probably close to one-third of the entire industry's active base of users, by far the largest."    Next Stage And now Inventor needs to be killed off, just as MDT was, and AME was before that. Autodesk wants all its software running on the cloud, but Inventor is tied too tightly into Microsoft's proprietary codebase so that porting it to another computing environment is neigh-impossible. We'll never see an "Inventor 360." The designated replacement is Fusion 360 -- eventually. Even though Autodesk touts it as a "cloud-based platform," Fusion runs 100% on MacOS and Windows desktop computers with links to process some functions on Autodesk's proprietary server. Fusion lacks some of the basics that mechanical designers expect from today's MCAD systems, although it is admired for its HSM CAM [computer aided manufacturing]component. Fusion files are not compatible with Inventor, or Vault even, with users reduced to exporting non-associative STEP files from Fusion to Inventor. And so sales of Fusion to existing Inventor customers are poor, with Autodesk admitting that 90% of Fusion users are new to the company. Autodesk has since slashed the price of the base Fusion version to $300 a year, and even dropped the price to $0 for students, startups of under $1 million in revenues, and anyone who can call themselves an "enthusiast" -- albeit partly in reaction to the arrival of Onshape. (The free version requires an annual renewal.) To be fair, Dassault Systemes has faced an even more difficult path bringing Solidworks customers to its 3DExperience server platform. After ten years of programming effort, it has no server-based replacement that Solidworks users want. Dassault now concedes it can provide only server-based ancillary software to Solidworks users. Autodesk affirmed at last winter's Autodesk University that it expects to keep Inventor going for another five to ten years, and plans to keep enhancing its functions. Inventor always was strong at industrial machinery design, and that emphasis will be continue. Which brings us to this year's release.   What's New in Inventor 2018 There were four mid-stream releases of Inventor 2017, and so 2018 naturally rolls up all those new functions. New to 2018 are a number of impressive enhancements, such as these: Partial fillets defined by offsets (see figure 1) Extrudes are made relative to other geometry Holes extend in both directions, and can have zero depth Sheet metal bodies have thicknesses defined by styles The Measure command automatically determines the geometry being measured   Figure 1: Defining the length of partial fillets in Inventor 2018 (all images sourced from Autodesk) Other new functions fall into the "what took them so long?" category: Rectangles placed around text Meshes displayed in drawing layouts BOMs [bills of material] sorted by user-defined strings Let me touch on some of the significant features new to Inventor 2018. Big Models. There is a space race going on among MCAD vendors that involves solving the problem of making their software work ever faster with really large, complex 3D models. As it turns out, there are only a few ways to do this: Avoid loading and displaying unneeded parts of assemblies (easy to do) Offload display calculations to the graphics board (moderate in difficulty) Access additional cores in the CPU to perform actions in parallel (difficult to implement) Inventor 2018 adds tweaks all over to reduce delays, such as these. When parts are not loaded, we still need to see them as 3D bounding boxes; in 2018, we can force the display of bounding boxes, even of parts that are loaded. There's faster hidden-line removal and view changes. Two-dimensional elements like sketches, drawing views, and raster underlays are displayed faster. MBD. Model-based design (and its superior cousin MBE, model-based engineering) is a way to integrate manufacturing information into 3D model files. This lets CNC tools read the 3D model, then produce the part. The idea is to avoid generating 2D plans, which nevertheless remains the common practice. MBD isn't terribly complex: it just a 3D model attached with leaders tagged with information the CNC machine needs, like finishes and tolerances; the dimensions are read directly from the model itself. Inventor 2018 finally integrates the capability, along with a Tolerance Advisor palette that warns which aspects still need MBD data (see figure 2).     Figure 2: Adding GD&T leaders to a part in Inventor 2018 Once we've attached GD&T and other manufacturing data to the 3D model, we export it as a 3D PDF file or as a STEP file using AP217 standards. If we still work with 2D drawings, then we ask Inventor to add MBD leaders to the views in our generated layouts automatically. AutoCAD. In most design firms, a few seats of Inventor are supplemented by dozens of seats of lower cost CAD software for making detail drawings. So it's important that Inventor have access to DWG files, and here 2018 makes things better when we place DWG files as underlays, like raster images.  In Inventor 2018, we can open DWG underlays in AutoCAD for further editing. Changes are updated manually in Inventor. When we create sketches, we can project geometry from DWG underlays. In the past, we could insert DWG files only in part files; with 2018, we can also place DWG files in assemblies, and place one or more at once. Layers and other properties are prefixed by the DWG file name so that one can be distinguished from another. (Think xrefs.) When it comes to non-Autodesk 3D models, Inventor's AnyCAD function now lets us edit the foreign parts, and then update the native assembly. The same AnyCAD system allows Inventor 2017.4 users to natively edit 2018 files. Sometimes it is better seeing new functions through videos, and so Autodesk has posted several at https://www.autodesk.com/products/inventor/features.   Conclusion Autodesk plans to sacrifice Inventor in five to ten years to the greater good of their subscription-only cloud-based utopia. This may, however, be difficult to execute, given Fusion and Inventor's inability to work inside each other's workspaces. Autodesk suggests using their online A360 project collaboration system, but this is not an effective workaround. Autodesk hasn't made the transition to the future clear to Inventor users; perhaps it will take Autodesk all those 5-10 years to accomplish the transition. Even as Inventor users continue to enthusiastically design with "their" software, its future in their livelihoods is precarious. There are the design firms that engage in projects that take years to complete; additionally, they require access to archival data for decades (think Boeing). They expect long-range certainty from their CAD vendor. There is the concrete problem of Autodesk's buy-or-die subscription plan, which all new customers are required to purchase. In theory, Autodesk could turn off subscription versions of Inventor to force customers onto Fusion. We have some evidence that these moves by Autodesk are giving potential customers pause, as Dassault Systemes credits Inventor's switch to subscriptions for last year's 12% increase in Solidworks revenues, with most sales as new, permanent-license ones. Inventor is being squeezed between a still-uber-successful Solidworks of the past and an as-yet incomplete Fusion for the future. http://www.autodesk.com/inventor [This article first appeared in Design Engineering magazine, and has been edited from its original form.] Sponsor: Okino Graphics == 3D CAD & DCC to Virtual/ Augmented Reality == With the explosive growth of VR/AR, the ultra-massive 3D datasets produced by CAD and DCC programs need efficient conversion to the popular Unity and Unreal development platforms. Okino of Toronto is the long-time provider of the PolyTrans|CAD translator, which easily handles the interactive datasets required by VR and AR for Microsoft HoloLens, HTC VIVE, Oculus Rift, Meta, and other VR headsets. PolyTrans provides you with Massive dataset handling Node compression Adaptive CAD tessellation Intelligent polygon reduction  Ppopualr CAD data sources include Solidworks, ProE/Creo, Inventor, AutoCAD, Revit, Navisworks, DGN IGES, STEP, Parasolid, and JT. 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Some of the runners-up were Toyota’s carbon fiber closure panels for the 2017 Prius Prime and Lexus LC500, and Faurecia’s Adaptive Valve for exhaust systems employed on the 2017 Chevrolet Silverado. http://www.cargroup.org   4G is as good as it will ever get for mobile data. Wavelength of much-speedier 5G is so short that its effective distance is measured in meters. By the way, "G5" is the new shorthand for 5.0GHz wifi, not to be confused with 5G phone data, short for "fifth generation." progeCAD 18.0.4 DWG-native CAD software with perpetual licensing supports DWG files from v2.5 and up to 2018. http://www.progesoft.com/en/products/progecad-professional BETA CAE Systems have released v18.0.0 of its FEA software suite with updates to ANSA, EPILYSIS and META. New in v18 is KOMVOS for interactive browsing, visualization, and handling of all data related to CAE analysis. http://www.beta-cae.com/news/20170728_announcement_suite_v18.0.0.htm   MAXON announces Cinema 4D Release 19 with improvements to viewport performance and Voronoi Fracturing, and a new Sound Effector. The complete list of new functions in Cinema is at https://www.maxon.net/en/products/new-in-release-19/r19-complete-feature-list For 2018, Dassault plans to increase number of apps on cloud from 67% to 87%, and to let users run V5 programs on 3dExperience. Given a choice between royalties and lump sum, always choose the lump sum: a guaranteed income is always better than a roll of the dice. Recall that the first consumer VR gear arrived 1995, with Nintendo's unit that used an array of red LEDs for the display. - - - For late-breaking CAD news, follow upFront.eZine on Twiter at @upfrontezine. Letters to the Editor I am having a difficult time locating the “Measuring the Unmeasurable” article that led to your “Readers Respond: Measuring the Unmeasurable” in today’s e-zine. Can you please point me to the original “Measuring the Unmeasurable” article?     - Rick Feineis     CAD Training Online The editor replies: I should have included a link, as it was a couple of months ago. Here you go: http://us9.campaign-archive1.com/?u=07b7371a0bd0d2271ef2aba3f&id=4a91880dbf   Thank You, Readers! Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine: Ken Etter Nancy Johnson Should you wish to support upFront.eZine through PayPal, then the suggested amounts are like these: $25 for individuals > paypal.me/upfrontezine/25 $150 for small companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/150 $625 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/625 Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and the account of [email protected]. 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Comments

[Ramakrishnan]

Its surprising that inventer is really getting squeezed between solidworks and fusion.

[Roopinder Tara]

I got the impression Inventor was being squeezed, too. Then I got a call from Autodesk that they were adding CAM and CAE to the Inventor "collection" at no extra charge. Read full report here http://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArticles/ArticleID/15425/Autodesks-CAD-Users-to-Get-CAE-and-CAM-For-Free.aspx