After reading countless threads on the Autodesk (AD) forum I would like to forward these well known requests again.
I had a meeting with the Norwegian AD manufacturing rep and was encouraged to send an email about our concerns. The below is what I sent. Please vote up if you agree.
As long time users of Inventor and a new user of the Autodesk manufacturing suite we thought we should bring across a few concerns that we have presently.
First of all, Inventor is a fantastic modeling program. Now that our company is starting to machine more parts in-house we would like to do the CAM work from within Inventor to keep our workflow streamlined.
Our primary concerns are in reality three things;
- No possibility to import tooling geometry directly into Inventor CAM Ultimate (is this the same as HSM? We are a bit confused there as well).
- All the major tool makers such as Sandvik and Kennametal have tool selection and "CAD generation" programs which are very convenient. However, please look at the attached screenshot. Autodesk are not represented on this list, but SolidWorks are. This should be an area of concern for Autodesk as this feature is easily a dealmaker or breaker.'
- You have tool library imports which is fine when the toolmakers have made these, but they generally don't. 3D files are the future, period.
- No "collision detection" in the Inventor CAM module. As the CNC machines are getting bigger, faster and have rotating and translating turrets this should be incorporated.
- We would like to know what Autodesk's long term plan for CAM is. Fusion 360 has seen a lot of major updates recently, whereas Inventor CAM (HSM?) is falling behind. The Autodesk forum has seen requests from users for the above mentioned features for five years, but nothing has happened. We want to spend our time on the future and not something that will gradually fade away. This should be more clearly communicated by Autodesk management. In any case, the cloud is not a real option for us presently. I have not spent much time in Fusion, but I have noticed that there are advanced features such as stress based geometry optimization which I believe Inventor lacks. (A small digression, but ProE had this optimization feature back in 2001!).
Finally, we are aware that Autodesk CAM products are a lot less expensive than for instance Mastercam or Esprit CAM suites. For this reason we do not compare these directly in terms of functionality.
However, the two missing features which we have highlighted should be easy for a company as Autodesk to incorporate in a future release - if you want to that is.
Even though we are just a four man company, moving over to Solidworks would be very painful for us. Sadly it is a real option just now as we need to look five or ten years ahead and we don't know where Autodesk is heading.
