Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

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mailswamp wrote:

Our college teaches only Autocad and not this semester.

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I suggest you transfer. Nobody has any business teaching AutoCAD anymore. Unless it's just giving you a taste of it sometime towards the end of the program just so you know how it used to be, sort of like board drafting. Learning AutoCAD as a primary CAD package is, to quote another user of this forum, "about as useful as being fluent in sanskrit". If they think that it's appropriate to teach AutoCAD then I shudder to think what other outdated crap they might be throwing at you.

Note that I'm not picking on it just because it's a community college, I went to one myself. The difference is mine taught us board drafting, then AutoCAD (briefly), then Inventor, and then CATIA v5.

[#2]

I am sorry.

I may have confused Inventor Fusion and Inventor Pro. They apparently are not interchangeable, besides that one is free  and the other one is not.

[#3]

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mailswamp wrote:

I am sorry.

I may have confused Inventor Fusion and Inventor Pro. They apparently are not interchangeable, besides that one is free  and the other one is not.

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Both are free to students http://www.autodesk.com/edcommunity

[#4]

Just a little more clarification-- there are two flavors of Inventor Fusion (which, as you point out, is not at all the same as Inventor): one version is packaged with Inventor, and the other is available on Labs as a technology preview (for free).  The latter is more like a beta version-- there's new stuff in there, new tools or interfaces that are being tested, may or may not find their way into the standard version that you get with Inventor.  At least that's what I remember from a class at AU a year or two ago.

[#5]

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sbixler wrote:

....The latter is more like a beta version-- there's new stuff in there, ...

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And there is apparently also LESS stuff in there.  I saw a thread in the Fusion forum that indicated the current TP no longer has a Spline command where 2012 and 2013 RTM does.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Inventor-Fusion/can-I-use-inventor-fusion-to-create-an-aircraft-model/...