Development.

The word development can be used for many purposes but in the context of this document it is going to refer to the ‘unfolding’ of components drawn or modelled in CAD software into flat forms.

Now you and AutoCAD can do this reasonably  well, you can be conventional and construct the development as you would have on a drawing board, you can also take a 2d/3d wireframe, ‘surfaces’ (not so great but they are there), regions or solids and just simply ‘unfold’ them, adjust to taste, dimension if necessary, or just hive it off to the CNC programmer as .dxf.  If you do enough, a lot, of this type of work get some good specific software to do it all for you.

Inventor’s sheet metal development I have accused of ‘being of not much use unless all you ever want to make has the equivalent complexity of a shoe box’, and I will not withdraw from that position unless proven otherwise.  There is a reason I make this statement and it revolves  around ‘FLEXIBILITY’ and the method Inventor applies to this task and how limiting this is for those who may create sheet metal components as part of a unique machine, customer or manufacturing requirement.

Rarely do these components fall into the category of 'box' abilities of Inventor and after all these years someone should have taken note of that fact by now.  Again I am not going to give a great deal away here suffice to say that this entire function needs to be re-thought so more creators of the ‘unusual things’ can play this game to.  And Autodesk put it into Mechanical Desktop so that it compliments and extends what we can already do.  Inventor is too far behind to even try and catch up!

Equally why does it have to be a separate file?  This is the first time I have mentioned Inventors ‘filing’ if you can call it that! I have seen this method used before, thinking…. that’s it; another old idea repackaged?

Neither 'development' nor Inventor's 'filing' are moves forward,  AutoCAD and Mechanical Desktop give us choice; all together or separate pieces (components and files) you choose based on your need, which counts for much much more in my eyes than fixed rules in a design and draughting environment any day.

R. Paul Waddington
cadWest.