Is Inventor the right product for me?

[Rfisher1994]

Sorry if I'm posting on the wrong forum, btw.

I'm wondering what the right product for me.  I work at a small company of less than 20 people and we manufacture specialty vehicles,  mainly mobile medical suites and testing laboratories that get shipped world wide.  We've been using Autocad let 2002 for 10 years now and it's time for an upgrade. 

What I do is relatively simple.  I take a drawing of a truck from one of the major manufactures and put a body on the back.  I put all the customers equipment inside,  size a generator and the gets turned into a sales drawing to show the customer.  If they buy the contract I get more detailed,  down to every nut and bolt.  I make drawings for the shop to build everything.  Then it gets built.  Right now all stress analysis gets done in house since after 20 years of doing this we pretty well know what works and doesn't work.  So I don't really need simulation or stress analysis.  I just need to be able to show everyone around me parts in 3D and do a couple technical things like run wires and hydraulic lines.  

Right now I do draw things down to the last nut and bolt and weld.  But a lot of it doesn't make sense to the shop employees.  2D is quite hard to make them understand.  

Thanks for any comments,  and when I get to a computer I will rewrite this probably.  My CO finally sees the benefits to 3D and I'm creating a presentation for him on what product to get and why.  Thanks! 

[JDMather]

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@Rfisher1994 wrote:

... and when I get to a computer I will rewrite this probably.  

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    I initially read this as, "....and when I get a computer I will rewrite this probably."

But seriously, that is about the same leap.  You are essentially using a drawing board and are moving to digital prototyping.  A world of difference.  I have only faint recollection of leaving behind more than a decade ago the workflow of which you speak.

It is time to move into the 21st century.

One of the comebacks I frequently hear is, "But my work is simple stuff, I don't need a powerful tool like Inventor."

Yes, Inventor makes the complicated stuff easy (like wire routing), but it is great for the simple stuff too.  I wouldn't even use AutoCAD to draw a rectangle (if there was any change the design was going to change).

[blair]

It's been almost 15 years for me, moving from a 2D environment to a 3D world. Even to the point of now having a WiLAN network in our plant with industrial tablets for the people on the production floor. Nothing beats having them look at the air control lines in 3D on a tablet. They are colored the same as the job calls for. They can look at the placement of each fitting on the valves and the color line running to it.

[JDMather]

Blair - can you show a Chronical navigating through an assembly example?

[Rfisher1994]

Yeah. The work I'm doing in 2D is basically sales drawings which are just a bunch of squares with numbers describing what it is in a top down view of the vehicle. The drawings for the shop guys only adds a few more circles and technical dimensions. Incredibly hard to understand but the most I can do with 2D. Even at 19 years old I could probably draw it by hand better than the program (Not getting into the debate I have with my supervisor about that being user error) My main issue is drawing the vehicle once, then again for the side view, then again for the rear front and bottom. I would like to draw the whole thing once and just cut my views from it. In high school I did an entire working roller coaster in 3 day and designed and priced every piece of material down to the seats as a class project in inventor. On 2D just the top down view of the sales drawing with boxes as equipment has averaged to be an 8 hour job for 10 years. I cut it down to 6. And I'm looking to go further.
And that's it, I need a program to where I can draw each piece of equipment and the vehicle once and then rotate it into different views. Put a border around it, number the equipment, and have a sales drawing in the same amount of time, but prettier and with more views than just the top.
Also the shop guys can't tell what I'm drawing in 2D. I end up scribbling down a 3d picture with most of things I print out or make something really simplistic in Autocad LT because I don't even know where to start with the 3D capabilities in that program. Once I made a cube that took like 45 minutes.
I'm thinking Inventor is what I should go with. I'm just not familiar with the rest of The Autocad software. Or any 3D software out there.

Edit: I'm familiar with Inventor 2011 Profesional from 2 years of high school.  

[JDMather]

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@Rfisher1994 wrote:
...
I'm thinking Inventor is what I should go with. I'm just not familiar with the rest of The Autocad software. Or any 3D software out there.

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It doesn't sound to me like you are ready to hit the ground running with 3D.  I think you face a signficant learning curve.  Your supervisor might not have the patience for the climb of this curve.  Start with a demo by your VAR.

[blair]

You might be interested in this Chronicle:
Walk-Around
https://chronicle.autodesk.com/main/details/217f7762-2b87-4ccf-bbd3-f70405ad9a29

[JDMather]

Very nice.
It looked like you had a lot of Engineer's Notes (yellow tags), is that correct?

The OP might not understand the significance of these - how they can help communication with the shop floor.

[blair]

Yes, the yellow tags are "Engineers Notes". Think of them as "Revision Notes" for a 3D drawing with considerable more information than a simple line of text and a flag.

Engineer Notes
https://chronicle.autodesk.com/main/details/33903b75-255e-40e8-8b64-30fdd426ec36

[blair]

We make use of Levels of Detail. This allows us to create a new view and on this view suppress the visability of components that we don't want on a desired view. This is great for the shop floor to look at only "views" that pertain to them. When we create our drawings we can also select these "views" and place them on the drawings as well.

https://chronicle.autodesk.com/Main/Details/996f61d7-c099-4a76-8bb3-2206a1d270c5

The ability to leverage a single model and quickly create "specific" views for downstream use quickly shortens "drawing" time.

https://chronicle.autodesk.com/main/details/bf278286-7a0c-4931-b08a-11ad8c3f7dd8

[Mario428]

Inventor will work just fine for you and what you want to do.

Not going to get into the merits of the other modelers avalable except to say your Autocad experience will do you no good in Inventor but you have already worked in Inventor so you know that.

I would strongly suggest some good training and some help from an experienced user to setup yuour first project setup such that it can easily be modified for successive projects.

Sounds like a lot of the projects will be similiar enough to allow a "save as" or "copy design" to save you a lot of time with new projects.