A good reason to have nVidia card in CAD workstation

The chipmaker nVidia has bought the German producer of Mental Ray – Mental Images.

This may influence future functionalilty of Inventor and AutoCAD (in a positive way) as Mental Ray is the rendering engine in almost all Autodesk software. You can expect that nVidia will try to support some Mental Ray functions directly on hardware and move some of the rendering tasks to the GPU. And all Mental Ray based CAD and visualization software will benefit from this – but of course only if you have an nVidia graphics card in your CAD workstation.

Nintendo Wii as a 3D controller for Inventor

Scott Sheppard has posted an interesting blog post about using Wii as a 3D input device for any CAD application, including Inventor and Design Review. So hurry to confiscate the game console from your children and install the Wii drivers on your CAD workstation (Christmas is so close…).

Read the A Wii bit of Fun on the labs.autodesk.com Blog.

Top 10 Christmas wishes for Inventor

AUGI has presented the results of the latest “user wishes” voting for Inventor. Unlike the previous votings, this one makes sense for me – most wishes are good to be granted in next versions of Inventor (I think it is too late to add anything to the Inventor 2009 feature list).

1. Ability to Retain Constraints In Assemblies Submitted by Peter Brodt – well, yes
2. True 64 Bit Inventor Submitted by Gary Harrison – a must!
3. Show the “other” source of constraint conflicts. Submitted by Xavier Venisse – could help
4. Hole on Side of Cylinder Submitted by Jon Selzer – a minor one
5. More Detailed Error messages Submitted by Kendred Cooper – always helps
6. Spelling Checker Submitted by Tony Fisher – a minor one
7. Add Workpoint at Center of Mass Submitted by Matt Dykhouse – long overdue
8. Add Quadrant Snap Submitted by D Beaty – good one
9. Be able to use ESC Key To Cancel any Command Submitted by Rob Saunders – would be logical
10. Different Extrude dimension for bi-directional extrudes Submitted by Cor de Vlaming – a minor one for me

I would add some other wishes – e.g. conversion from/to other file formats, better text formating/editor and easier installation.