Inventor Factory Overview
The Autodesk Factory Design Utilities for Inventor are a plug-in to the assembly environment. They provide design tools and an optimized environment for factory floor layout.
A factory floor layout is a 3D model of a factory, warehouse, or office environment. The size and complexity can range from a workcell to an entire factory. The layout can contain building elements such as walls, columns, and utilities. You can check for interference and plan how individual pieces of equipment connect to power, data, compressed air, or other resources.
The Factory Assets library contains models of standard factory components such as conveyors, ductwork, and walls. You can publish your frequently used models to the library. You can also use Inventor part and assembly files or imported models.
Cross-Product Workflows
Inventor Factory provides Cross-Product Workflows that enables you to create a bidirectional associative link between a 3D factory layout and a 2D AutoCAD drawing. This link, called Layout Sync, is established between Inventor and AutoCAD Architecture or AutoCAD Mechanical.
Inventor workflows associated with AutoCAD are:
- Open in AutoCAD - Opens the active 3D Inventor layout in 2D AutoCAD.
- Open in Navisworks - Opens the active Inventor file in Navisworks so that you can visualize your layout and run clash detections.
Additionally, you can find the command that enables you manually update the IAM file from the LAYOUTDATA file.
- Update IAM from LAYAOUTDATA - Updates the IAM file with any existing changes from the LAYOUTDATA file.