Rowe Updateon Inventor LT

Jeffrey Rowe of CADalyst magazine describes Inventor LT, and provides this important news nugget: the license no longer prohibits commerical use of the for-now free software.

Comments

[Jason]

Jeff mentions that its worked for Autocad LT so it may work out for Inventor LT. Only problem is Inventor LT is way more cripled than Acad LT is. The stuff removed from Autocad LT is seldom used anyway...all the core drawing tools are there. Not having assembly capabilities in Inventor LT pretty much leaves this as a novelty in my opinion. Just not as good a deal as Alibre's free version.

[Richard Williams]

Once again Mr. Jeffrey Rowe is 100% correct. However, there are those in the industry that work with MCAD softwares a lot and I'm sure they would not be using something that could not build assemblies at all. But there are those youngsters out there that need to get their feet wet with MCAD even as a stepping stone towards their future use of MCAD. This is a golden opportunity to work with a world class application even in the part mode only ability. After all parts are the building blocks of assemblies and we all need to know that well. I applaud Autodesk for allowing the Inventor LT and AutoCAD LT to come into the hands of the future Engineers, Architects and Scientists. I wonder what happened to SolidWorks with all of this? Mohave Desert Writer & Teacher.

[R.Paul Waddington.]

Jason is correct AutoCAD LT is a package that can pay for itself easily and I personally thinks he is on the money with Alibre. I have suggested Alibre Express to many now as the intructory tool of choice for newbies wanting to get into this area and will continue to so because of the assembly capabilty. As an Inventor (Mechanical Desktop preferred) user Inventor LT without assemblies is of little use. Even hobbyist will always want to assemble several pieces unless it is Chessmen that they are wanting to model. I disagree with Richard; Autodesk is doing nobody a favour with Inventor LT, it's a ploy, they are trying to muddy the waters nto improve them. In reality Inventor LTs, as a part modeller, value is to existing or new users of 'full blown' Inventor who will use it along with full versions for assembling part work allocated to a wider team; that makes up for its deficiency and would make commercial sense as well.
Also the release of Inventor LT is another example of why Autodesk is an industry follower not an industry leader; Inventor was a reaction product and Inventor LT demonstrates Autodesk's thinking is still being driven by it competitors - not its customers as they would have us think - most notably Alibre.

[lucap.]

sorry, but you are doing simple publicity to a non useful mcad product, which is no good for engineers and manufactoring producers who are trying to understand what's good and what's not, for them. the only complete and competitive mcads at the moment (for a 3D design use, without looking forward hard, to product as catia or pro/e, which is also becoming an old kernel based product) are solidworks and inventor (we cannot include even solidedge or thinkdesign, they are clearly losing in competition); be professional please.

[Gary]

I am fairly new to the mcad arena and have been following upfront ezine's newsletters for some years now. I have read about all the players in this market and have seen their products debut as they are released. I was excited when Alibre came into the mcad market, esp. for their price vs. Solidworks or Inventor. Now that Autodesk has apparently tried to play catch-up with, most notably Alibre Design, with its release of Inventor LT; I am a little surprised at the feature package they are offering with this new release. When compared with what Alibre offers, it seems to me that Autodesk is afraid to stick their neck out too far with what they are offering, esp. by leaving out the assembly functionality within Inventor LT. With what they are going to offer this software for when it becomes for sale, <$1000, I would think in order to entice buyers to take a serious look at their new product, they would match what Alibre offers in their software. How many times have I designed a one part model? Hmmm, maybe once! This is 3D modeling we are talking about here, not 2d drafting as Acad Lt offers. I don't know, we will see what happens!