Autodesk Inventor

Has anyone had any experience with using the Autodesk Inventor plug-in for basic hull design? It is supposed to have some useful tools for 3d faces, surfaces, 3d sweep command and other 3d stuff like that. If so let me know what you think/ thought of it.
Peace, Joey

 

Your thread made me register, although I’ve been watching this forum for a couple of years.
First of all I apologize for my English, I’m borne Romanian and now I'm almost Canadian.
I found Inventor a very interesting tool, for the moment I draw compactors rollers for constructions application, but as a former seaman and a perpetual dreamer for a boat (a sailboat), I’ve tried to draw a boat. Is not too easy, but I think one with a lot of patience and more experience, can do something beautiful. Well, the good part is that you can split the underwater body of the hull, and find the volume and the center of this volume for a floating plane you can easily choose. A floating surface, not necessarily plane. You draw the hull, maybe the deck and superstructure also, like a solid, and after you find the proper shape, you can built around a boat on another file: derived body, give thickness for the hull, ad structure...
For the moment I think, you cannot do structure calculations, like you can do for example for an single element in mechanical desktop. But Inventor can be very promising.
The images represent a 2-3 hours work, is supose to be a trailerboat of 7m (23') long and 1.8t desplacement.

 

We have used Inventor for many years (and Mechanical Desktop before that). For yacht design we now prefer Rhino because of it's superior capabilities in surface modelling. Surfaces in Rhino can be sectioned to produce 3D contours on the hull (stations, waterlines etc). Surfaces can be joined to make a "solid" that can be imported to Inventor, AutoCAD or IntelliCAD for sectioning and detail work.

regards,
Ragnar Thor Mikkelsen
www.MBOATS.no