Autodesk has unveiled its new 3D design and engineering software portfolio for manufacturers, offering a set of integrated and interoperable suites and cloud services to simplify design, visualisation and simulation workflows from product development through delivery.
The new Autodesk design suites are geared especially for manufacturers and include Autodesk Product Design Suite and Autodesk Factory Design Suite.
The new suites provide a range of cloud services to help manufacturers more efficiently design, build and deliver better products faster and at reduced costs. The new Autodesk Simulation family of products promises a more accurate and flexible approach to predicting, optimising and validating designs earlier in the design process.
“Autodesk’s 2013 portfolio provides our customers with a faster path to ROI for product development and delivery,” said Robert “Buzz” Kross, senior vice president, Design, Lifecycle and Simulation at Autodesk. “Our 2013 suites and scalable cloud services help manufacturers improve productivity and minimise upfront investment.”
Autodesk suites provide workflows to connect desktops to mobile devices and to the cloud. These workflows enable manufacturing customers to develop complete definitions of product designs; integrate electrical and mechanical design to increase productivity; predict product performance; and visualise designs or complete factory layouts in 3D.
Autodesk’s 2013 design suites integrate with Autodesk 360 cloud offerings to better enable collaboration. Cloud-based assets promote design sharing and reuse.
The suites also offer interoperability with the new 2013 version of Autodesk Vault product data management software and the company’s next generation, cloud-based alternative Autodesk PLM 360. Autodesk Vault software enables workgroups to organise, manage and track their engineering CAD data, manufacturing bills-of-material and change processes from a centralised location.
The 2013 Autodesk Product Design and Factory Design suites are available in three editions: Standard, Premium and Ultimate.
The Autodesk Product Design Suite enables design, visualisation and simulation capabilities, helping to drive innovation with integrated, discipline-specific tools and workflows built for Digital Prototyping.
New for Autodesk Product Design Suite 2013 are the addition of one-click workflows created to help customers seamlessly move through the engineering design process, advanced cloud-based services for simulation and the inclusion of additional software allowing customers to realise their end-to-end design process.
Autodesk Product Design Suite 2013 updates include:
- Autodesk Inventor software in the Standard edition, establishing 3D parametric design as the foundation to the engineering design process and providing a solution that delivers powerful 3D design and drafting capabilities.
- AutoCAD Electrical software and Autodesk Inventor Routed Systems in the Premium and Ultimate editions, delivering a complete integrated electromechanical system capable of producing an entire product definition, including fully defined tubing, piping and hydraulic systems.
- Autodesk Navisworks Simulate in Premium and Ultimate editions, providing integrated electromechanical, markup and visualisation workflows capability.
The suite enhances AutoCAD and Autodesk Inventor software with access to interoperable, layout-specific workflows, new cloud-based factory asset resources and powerful visualisation and analysis tools.
Specifically, the one-to-one synchronisation between 2D AutoCAD drawings and the 3D Inventor assembly within the suite means changes made in the AutoCAD drawing will propagate to the Inventor 3D layout, and changes in the 3D layout will propagate back to the original 2D drawing.