Inventor Fusion Technology Preview 2 – Part 4

In this post I would like to share bits of my conversation with Kevin Schneider of Autodesk.

Deelip: Do you know of any other MCAD vendor that was going down the same road as Autodesk in terms of uniting direct modeling and history based parametric modeling?

Kevin: None that I know of.

Deelip: Are you aware of what PTC is doing on this front?

Kevin: Yes, to an extent, I am aware of what they are doing. But the key is that we have something that is working and we are in a position to let our customers test it. Of course, these are early days and we need to improve this technology a lot.

Deelip: SolidWorks has publicly stated that it will continue to enhance its Instant3D feature as its way of offering its customers direct modeling capability. Do you think Autodesk and SolidWorks are converging to the same solution but from different directions?

Kevin: I would not like to comment on the SolidWorks approach. However, I can say that what we are offering is something unique, something which has never been done before. In fact this is what everyone said was impossible. We have now shown that is is possible.

Deelip: How much of this technology belongs to Autodesk?

Kevin: I can tell you that all of what we showed you today is our own technology.

Deelip: Are you saying that Autodesk has not used technology from any other company at all?

Kevin: That would not be an accurate statement. Things get complicated when a technology like this is involved. But I can say for sure that the Shape Manager technology, which is the backbone of Inventor Fusion, is 100% our own.

Deelip: Does Inventor Fusion use the same modeling kernel based upon ACIS 7.0 when it exercised the option of purchasing the source code from Spatial?

Kevin: Yes. Over the years we have enhanced our modeling kernel and we continue to invest heavily into it.

Deelip: When will Inventor Fusion come out of Autodesk Labs and start shipping as a product?

Kevin: When our customers tell us that it is ready.