Inventor for Facade Engineering

[Anonymous]

Dear Rob and development team, I am a graduate facade engineer working as a consultant (not for contractors or manufacturers). I would like to experiment new tools and I started to study Inventor but I am not completely sure about its suitability to facade design. Would you suggest using it to produce connections details or entire facade systems such as unitised (or stick) curtain walls, aluminium/concrete panels etc? How reliable is the stress analysis simulation compared to Robot or other FEM software?

Suggestion_
If you recommend to use Inventor for envelope design, than thermal and water analysis tools would be very appreciate from facade engineers!

Any tutorials where to pick up some tips for facade development in Inventor?
Thank you for your help and best of luck,Cris

[Anonymous]

-waiting for an answer-

[rmerlob]

I don´t have any experience on what you do, but from your post that sounds like something that Autodesk Revit should do.

RM

[mcgyvr]

http://www.autodesk.com/suites/building-design-suite/overview

[Anonymous]

Good morning Autodesk, I met many professionist from the facade industry which say Inventor is a good software but they don't actually know how to use it. Also Companies search recruiting for staff request knowledge of Inventor.

If there is anyone in your team with a bit of experience on this field I am sure it would be a very well appreciated thread to follow.

What we usually do is working with secondary structure (mullion/transom), panels/sequence of panels (of different materials glass, insulation, cement, etc.) connections (plates, bolt, screws, welding, etc.). Some of the advance industry is moving to dynamic facades.

Inventor would be usefull to FEM analysis even of small components without having to export it while keeping documentation linked to a parametric model. Although, what I find to be tricky (maybe because I don't have enough experience yet) is to have part files used just for rectangular panels. I know icopy would be a great solution allowing to have 1 adaptive cube file for each material but I can't find any suitable tutorial to set up the first part file (before the adaptive assembly).

What would be also very interesting are workflow tutorials related to facade. (there is something from Rob, but it is just a couple of quick videos, very interesting but not enought to learn)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayDYAuRL6z8

For the sake of clarity I attach quick examples of possibile documentation (from google).

Of course if you think this software is suitable for this purpose, a thermal analysis tool would be incredibly useful.

Thank you for your support.

Regards,

Cris

[Anonymous]

For the people interested, here you will find some clarifications.

www.revitforum.org/architecture-general-revit-questions/20233-revit-vs-inventor-curtain-wall-again.h...

Apparently Inventor is a good tool for facade engineering.

Btw, I find quite unprofessional not be interested in such a contemporary topic.

People uses your software for large projects which involve lots of money and risk (see the link below). It would be useful for both you and your customer (I am one of those) to discuss about possibile uses and future development of Inventor.

cadgroup.com.au/Data/Attachments/SAHMRI%20case%20study.pdf

Example of issues of facade engineering are thermal expansion, thermal flow, glass design, buckling of aluminium profiles etc. It would definitely become the lead software in this field with those tools.

Regards

[mcgyvr]

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@Anonymous.belfiore wrote:

Btw, I find quite unprofessional not be interested in such a contemporary topic.

People uses your software for large projects which involve lots of money and risk (see the link below). It would be useful for both you and your customer (I am one of those) to discuss about possibile uses and future development of Inventor.

cadgroup.com.au/Data/Attachments/SAHMRI%20case%20study.pdf

Example of issues of facade engineering are thermal expansion, thermal flow, glass design, buckling of aluminium profiles etc. It would definitely become the lead software in this field with those tools.

Regards

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Just so you are aware.. This site is a "user forum" for users of the software to discuss their issues. This is NOT a forum for Autodesk employees. 

The reason no one is responding to this post is because no one here is using it for facade engineering. 

Also Inventor is developed/improved based on customer needs. The more customers needing something the faster it gets done.. So based on this post you can expect Autodesk to do NOTHING to incorporate your facade needs into Inventor. Its mostly intended for electro-mechanical product design,etc... not architectual/facade engineering. There clearly isn't enough interest/need to even discuss at this point.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the quick feedback, I was sent in this forum from someone in Autodesk. Maybe there is a bit of confusion in their offices.

I suppose heat in mechanical engineering is fundamental as much as for electrical purposes. And Facade IS strictly related to static mechanical engineering. Practically all building corporate asks for people with knowledge in Inventor.
General misunderstanding between software developers and industry.
I will move the discussion in some other specific group.

Thank you for your time

[CianG]

Inventor should work well for modelling & detailing of Fascade Building.

Revit Architectural maybe a little to general and not go into the details enough.

Analysising the structure within Inventor I don't know.

Why don't you do a test model (from a previous project) & run some trials to see how it compares.

Cian

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your feedback,

I will try to build up a quick mockup of a facade and run a structural analysis in Inventor followed by an analysis in Robot. It will be interesting to compare the results.

I was wondering if the FEA algoritms in Inventor are the same as Robot, in that case we will should have the same result.

However the 'mother' software of Robot should come from Robobat which was a Polish software.. I suppose Inventor has a complete different organization.

Keep in touch,
Cris

[mcgyvr]

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@Anonymous.belfiore wrote:
Thank you for your feedback,

I will try to build up a quick mockup of a facade and run a structural analysis in Inventor followed by an analysis in Robot. It will be interesting to compare the results.

I was wondering if the FEA algoritms in Inventor are the same as Robot, in that case we will should have the same result.

However the 'mother' software of Robot should come from Robobat which was a Polish software.. I suppose Inventor has a complete different organization.

Keep in touch,
Cris

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http://www.autodesk.com/products/robot-structural-analysis/overview

[Anonymous]

I just came across this feed when I was trying to figure inventor usage for buildng facade modeling and simulation analysis.

Any update on this work flow?

[Anonymous]

Cris, we are looking for Facade Engineers as we are using Inventor. Please contact me David@worldofwindows.co.za or 0027828810137

David - Cape Town

[jnoordzij]

I find this topic incredibly useful as it is exactly what I am going through at the moment. I work at a facade egineering firm which has just started to shift to BIM and 3d, and we started off with Revit as our basic BIM software. But after only a few months of use it has become clear to me that Revit is not suited for the details that are concerned with facade engineering. What i want is the full detail of profiles, gaskets, screws, hinges, you name it. Bring this up in a Revit forum and they dont understand you. Revit is used for coarse components like concrete floors, brick walls, interior walls, simple doors, etc. The curtain wall feature of Revit is in no way able to do what my firm does in reality. Its too rigid, not flexible at all. In a sense, facade engineering is sort of in between Inventor and Revit. We need the big building scale and scope, for which Revit is absolutely awesome. But we also need the highly detailed components, BOM's, CNC data, etc, as we are also a manufacturing company. So, very pleased to read about other facade designers in this forum. Thanks for leading the way in this field!

[Anonymous]

We find the best compatibility between REVIT and Inventor is simply the centre line reference model of 'wireframe'. We have now started changing this wire frame into a parametric reference model to allow automated changes in modulation.