We saw the introduction of Mini Toolbars in Inventor 2011 and these have been further expanded within Inventor 2012.
The Mini Toolbars now appear in most of the feature tools within Inventor and you now have access to more Options within the Mini Toolbar itself. Alongside this update has been the addition of enhanced previewing when you are adding a feature such as Holes and Fillets. You will now notice that you get a real time preview, which you can interact with.
Marking Menus have been around in the industry for a while and those that use them 8-10 hours a day fly around never searching for commands or pallets to update. A flick of the wrist and off to the next command.
With the Marking Menu, muscle memory will eventually kick in. But with all changes, a transition period is needed to get used to the new menu. Some of you may have already turned it off, but we recommend giving it a try.
There are two modes you can use the Marking Menu with. The first is as you see it below, a typical pop up style menu, but with radial access to commands.
The new Projects feature helps you organise and manage all project related data from anywhere in Project Explorer. Projects uses property-aware links to represent objects stored in the Vault. When you make a change to a file using one of these links, only the source file is impacted. This linking system lets you manage all entity types directly from the main grid, giving you a single seamless interface for Project administration.
The new release of Autodesk Vault 2012 Workgroup, Collaboration and Professional brings a deeper level of integration with both Autodesk Inventor and AutoCAD. Vault now provides support to populate the Revision Table within Inventor (idw or dwg) and AutoCAD (dwg). From Vault, you can map the Revision assigned to a file and have it reflect the revision-bumping rules. This means that Title Blocks get updated alongside Revision Tables, adding rows to match the correct Revision level in Vault. The benefit? This automation removes another step in the management of files from the users workflow.
Administration
Configuring the Revision Table integration begins in Vault. Log in with Administrative rights, and go to Tools > Administration > Vault Settings > Behaviours TAB. In the Properties area, click Revision Table. If you haven't set up Revision Tables, you will be met with an initially collapsed dialogue box. Check the box to Enable Revision Table Control.
For those of you who like to key in commands, save time, or for those who cannot remember the full command every time, make life easier with the new AutoComplete feature in 2012.
In AutoCAD 2012, as you key in commands, AutoCAD will automatically complete the entry for you. If you pause, a list of all possible commands and system variables are displayed for easy selection.
The new Content Explorer enables you to quickly search for all types of content including blocks, attributes, layers and styles. Found on the Plugins TAB on the Ribbon (or command = contentexplorer), Content Explorer can search through thousands of files almost instantaneously, including the Autodesk Seek web service.
