Autodesk is now shipping its Autodesk Inventor 2008 software, the latest release of the company's 3D mechanical design package.

The new release of the Inventor family of products is said to make it easier than ever for customers to add the power of 3D design to existing 2D design processes, helping them save time and money, improve quality and foster innovation.

The Inventor 2008 release contains a host of features that enhance the digital prototyping process. For example, using DWG Trueconnect, users can read and write DWG files without translators while maintaining full associativity with the 3D Inventor model, enabling them to increase reuse and sharing of 2D manufacturing data. In addition, new capabilities for importing Autocad surface and solid data, combined with new DWG export from Autodesk Aliasstudio software, provides a quick and reliable way to transfer concept designs into Inventor.

New sheet metal design tools can improve productivity when designing sheet metal parts and provide support for manufacturing information, including flat pattern modifications and punch tool data. And ribbon cable design tools give users full control over the shape and routing of ribbon cables, which simplifies the design of electrical wiring and reduces manufacturing errors by allowing all types of wiring to be included in the digital prototype and subsequent documentation.

Lastly, an updated 2D sketch environment helps to reduce the learning curve for new designers and can improve productivity for existing designers with clearer constraint status information and sketch geometry formatting tools.

Autodesk Inventor 2008