Autodesk® Inventor™ software is the foundation for digital prototyping. The Autodesk® Inventor™ model is an accurate 3D digital prototype that enables users to validate design and engineering data as they work, minimize the need for physical prototypes, and reduce costly engineering changes discovered after the design is sent to manufacturing. With innovative approaches to accelerate and simplify the concept-to-manufacturing process, Autodesk® Inventor™ has outsold all competitors for the sixth consecutive year..

Sheet Metal

• Sheet Metal styles: allows users to set up and share sheet metal styles for different materials and sheet gauges. In addition, users can import bend data from Bend Table Definition Files and manage with the Inventor styles Editor.
  
• Sheet Metal Fasteners: users can insert PEM brand fasteners, including self-clinching nuts, pressed nuts, standoffs, and studs into sheet metal designs.
  
• Named Flat Pattern Orientations: associate different flat pattern orientations with different members of an iPart factory.
  
• Flat Pattern Drawings: users can create flat pattern views of different iPart members irrespective of the saved state of the sheet metal iPart.

Dynamic Simulation

• Spur Gears: use the design accelerator to create spur gears and the dynamic simulation environment will automatically insert a rolling joint and initialize the efficiency, helix angle, and pressure angle parameters.
  
• Output Grapher Enhancements: examine forces and moments in different reference frames, create additional traces without re-running the simulation, and determine the precise point of impact of contact events.
  
• Output to Inventor Studio: increase the realism of Studio animations by rendering the output of dynamic simulations. Use the Create Studio Animation command and all of the simulation parameters are automatically transferred to the Studio environment.

64 Bit Support
Inventor 2009 ships with 32- and 64-bit implementations. The installer automatically installs the 64-bit version when it detects a 64-bit version of Windows XP or Windows Vista. In addition, a display option for physical memory usage shows users how much physical memory is being used. On 64-bit systems, the capacity meter shows physical memory, or RAM, utilization.

Assembly Design
Using assembly substitutes, users have the advantages of lighter assemblies that still preserve accurate mass properties, including center of gravity, assembly constraints, and bill of materials data. For example, users can use a substitute part to represent an assembly when they don't need access to the full assembly representation but still need to see how components and sub-assemblies interact. Substitute parts can now be called out directly from the Level of Detail folder so you can quickly switch between the substitute and any other LoD representation.
This release of Inventor also includes improvements to the Derived Part tool and Angle Constraint. The GripSnap tool, which combines flexibility, ease of use and precision that allows users to explore different configuration during the early design definition phase.

Drawing Manager
Time savers in drawing include the ability to crop views in the drawing when users need to show one side of a symmetrical part or when they only need to show a smaller part of a larger part or assembly; supports rectangular, circular and polygonal crop windows and avoids the need to use the breakout tools. The Interference Edge Display, in the View dialog Display Option tab, turns on calculation of interference edges so users no longer need to draw these in afterwards with the sketch tools.