Autodesk Unveils New Design Suites and Cloud Services for Manufacturers

Autodesk, Inc. today unveiled its new 3D design and engineering software portfolio for manufacturers, offering a complete set of integrated and interoperable suites and cloud services to simplify design, visualization and simulation workflows from product development through delivery.

The new Autodesk design suites are geared especially for manufacturers and include Autodesk Product Design Suite and Autodesk Factory Design Suite. The new suites provide a broad range of cloud services to help manufacturers more efficiently design, build and deliver better products faster and at reduced costs. The new Autodesk Simulation family of products delivers a faster, more accurate and flexible approach to predicting, optimizing and validating designs earlier in the design process.

“Autodesk’s 2013 portfolio provides our customers with a faster path to ROI for product development and delivery,” said Robert “Buzz” Kross, senior vice president, Design, Lifecycle and Simulation at Autodesk. “Our 2013 suites and scalable cloud services help manufacturers improve productivity and minimize upfront investment.”

Autodesk Design Suites Enhance Interoperability, Collaboration

Autodesk suites provide comprehensive workflows to connect desktops to mobile devices and to the cloud. These workflows enable manufacturing customers to develop complete definitions of product designs; integrate electrical and mechanical design to increase productivity; predict product performance; and visualize designs or complete factory layouts in 3D.

Autodesk’s 2013 design suites integrate with Autodesk 360 cloud offerings to better enable collaboration. Cloud-based assets promote design sharing and reuse. The suites also offer interoperability with the new 2013 version of Autodesk Vault product data management software and the company’s next generation, cloud-based alternative Autodesk PLM 360. Autodesk Vault software enables workgroups to organize, manage and track their engineering CAD data, manufacturing bills-of-material and change processes from a centralized location.

The 2013 Autodesk Product Design and Factory Design suites are available in three cost-effective, convenient editions: Standard, Premium and Ultimate.

Autodesk Product Design Suite Completes the Entire Engineering Process

Delivering a comprehensive software solution, the Autodesk Product Design Suite enables design, visualization and simulation capabilities, helping to drive innovation with integrated, discipline-specific tools and workflows built for Digital Prototyping.

New for Autodesk Product Design Suite 2013 are the addition of one-click workflows created to help customers seamlessly move through the engineering design process, advanced cloud-based services for simulation and the inclusion of additional software allowing customers to realize their end-to-end design process. Autodesk Product Design Suite 2013 updates include:

Autodesk Inventor software in the Standard edition, establishing 3D parametric design as the foundation to the engineering design process and providing a solution that delivers powerful 3D design and drafting capabilities.
AutoCAD Electrical software and Autodesk Inventor Routed Systems in the Premium and Ultimate editions, delivering a complete integrated electromechanical system capable of producing an entire product definition, including fully defined tubing, piping and hydraulic systems.
Autodesk Navisworks Simulate in Premium and Ultimate editions, providing integrated electromechanical, markup and visualization workflows capability.
“The Autodesk Product Design Suite has been an invaluable tool for Sunkist Research and a big part of our success, from generating animations in Autodesk 3ds Max Design, to overlaying a 3D model in a real-time factory environment to actual engineering design and 3D modeling with the Autodesk Inventor suite,” said Alex Paradiang, director of engineering, Sunkist Research. “We have showcased our engineering talents with Autodesk software and displayed to our customers that we are constantly looking for the best solutions to help maintain our lead in the citrus industry.”

Autodesk Factory Design Suite Brings Digital Prototyping to the Factory Floor

The suite enhances AutoCAD and Autodesk Inventor software with exclusive access to interoperable, layout-specific workflows, new cloud-based factory asset resources and powerful visualization and analysis tools that help increase design accuracy, efficiency and communication.

Specifically, the one-to-one synchronization between 2D AutoCAD drawings and the 3D Inventor assembly within the suite means changes made in the AutoCAD drawing will propagate to the Inventor 3D layout, and changes in the 3D layout will propagate back to the original 2D drawing. The bidirectional associative workflow of the suite provides veteran AutoCAD users with a familiar, easy to learn process for generating compelling 2D and 3D factory layouts while improving efficiency and accuracy.

“The Autodesk Factory Design Suite allows us to model packaging lines in a digital environment,” said Brian Strothcamp, senior designer with the Barry-Wehmiller Design Group. “We can visualize different options more easily to find innovative and practical solutions. Interactive, 3D walkthroughs give our clients confidence that our factory layouts will satisfy all their needs.”

Autodesk Inventor Publisher: Accurate and Compelling Product Documentation

Autodesk Inventor Publisher 2013 extends the value of Autodesk Design Suites by leveraging the same 3D digital model used in the design process for developing highly visual and interactive 2D and 3D technical documentation that helps explain and differentiate products and processes. Inventor Publisher 2013 features faster performance, new video output formats that can be published directly to YouTube and Facebook, and many new interoperability additions, such as new file import formats, automatic update with new assembly formats and integration with Sketchbook Designer.

Autodesk Simulation: Fast, Accurate and Flexible

The Autodesk Simulation family of products delivers a fast, accurate and flexible approach to predict, optimize and validate designs earlier in the design process. The new family includes 2013 versions of Autodesk Simulation Mechanical, Autodesk Simulation CFD, Autodesk Simulation Moldflow and serves as a comprehensive set of simulation software tools that are easy to integrate into each phase of the product development process. Enhancements to the 2013 simulation portfolio include:

Autodesk Simulation Mechanical – Interoperability with Autodesk Showcase 2013 allows for results to be imported into Autodesk Showcase to create high-quality photo realistic renderings and presentations.
Autodesk Simulation CFD – Up to a 34 times improvement in overall solve time, while Autodesk Inventor Fusion enhancements include the ability to create associative internal and external fluid volumes, the ability to detect interferences, and automatic model simplification.
Autodesk Simulation Moldflow and Autodesk Moldflow Insight WS – Allows designers and manufacturers involved in injection molding simulation to address the trend towards lightweight designs. The cloud-enabled tools provide access to computation power and enable the user to solve multiple scenarios in parallel, thereby reducing previous limitations and increasing productivity.
“Articulinx is a small, yet innovative company. Our unique technology requires that we have the ability to run multiple simulation computations in parallel without being bogged down or losing productivity,” said Rick Lilly, R&D engineering manager at Articulinx. “We selected Autodesk Insight WS so that we could easily scale our Moldflow access, and it works amazingly well for us.”

Availability

Product availability varies by country. Purchasing a design suite with Autodesk Subscription helps customers stay current and connected with access to the latest workflows on desktops, mobile devices and in the cloud. See details and purchasing options at www.autodesk.com/purchaseoptions.

Autodesk, Inc., is a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Customers across the manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries -- including the last 17 Academy Award winners for Best Visual Effects -- use Autodesk software to design, visualize and simulate their ideas. Since its introduction of AutoCAD software in 1982, Autodesk continues to develop the broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art software for global markets. For additional information about Autodesk, visit http://usa.autodesk.com.