Cross functionality between Inventor and 3ds Max/Interactive

[Anonymous]

The company I work for is very mechanically minded. We utilize Inventor for most of our product design. A few months ago we noticed that 3ds max was included in our software package from Autodesk. Ever since we have been dabbling with 3ds Max Interactive in VR environments to show off our Inventor models. We can bring in our models from inventor to 3ds Max then export those meshes to 3ds Max Interactive. It is nice to be able to look at the size, shape and scale of the model. Where 3ds max lacks is mechanical functions. 

Think of it like this, say I wanted to model a car with engine, tires, brakes, bumpers, ect.... Inventor would be a nice, professional tool for that function. I can make sliced views and exploded views to illustrate what sub-assemblies go where and how pieces fit together. In order to export and view a similar thing in a VR environment (via 3ds max) it would take a lot of animating and/or flow control programming. I would have to re-do all constraints and patterns on an individual basis. 

I realize 3ds max/interactive and Inventor are different programs with different purposes, it just seems to me that these two Autodesk products have a huge potential to work together better. In a perfect world I would like to see an average user with an Inventor background be able to transition back and forth between Inventor and 3ds Max Interactive seamlessly. 

Let me know your thoughts,

Matt

[brentscannell]

Hi @Anonymous

You're certainly not alone! We had some research activity going on for improvement in this area, but we've since scaled back a little. Seamless back and forth transition between Inventor and 3ds Max would absolutely be awesome, but we need to take baby steps 🙂

If we had to summarize your idea in a single line and highlight the most important area needing improvement/new features..would it be "I want to bring my mechanical constraints, authored in Inventor, into 3ds Max without loss of interactivity" ? Or something else?

[electrotoast_old]

We certainly appreciate the thought behind this Idea. However, the current workflow is to enable use of 3ds Max as the intermediary as it is best at dealing with that mesh data prior to going to real time. We made the connection to 3ds Max Interactive more seamless so it felt part of the program. It's a 1-2 button press to get there.

Archiving this as we don't plan on working on this in the near future. Note that Archive does not mean delete. If at a later time we do decide to work on this, we can change its status at that point.