One of the outputs in the piping industry is to create an Isometric drawing. This allows the fabricators to build the pipe line using a drawing that contains lines, symbols and a BOM.

In Inventor 2025 and previous versions, if you wanted to create an Iso from the pping that you have modelled, you would have to export it as a .PCF file and take it out to a program like Caeser II or AutoCAD Plant 3D. If you are on a Product Design and Manufacturing Collection subscription, you would naturally gravitate to AutoCAD Plant as it is one of the software packages that you have available through the subscription.

One of the issues was the mapping of the Skey. If it was not correct or not present, the mapping between the 2 products would not occur and the Iso would not be created correctly. Inventor 2025 had a limited amount of options to specify an Skey and no option to create a custom Skey. Because of this it was difficult, nigh practically impossible to get many PCF’s output to successfully create an Iso in AutoCAD Plant 3D.

A few years ago, the Inventor and AutoCAD Plant 3D community got together and posted their frustrations about how this was so difficult, seeing that both softwares were manufactured from the same company. They even posted a solution on how to achieve the success in exporting the PCF and creating the Iso.

As Autodesk monitors these posts, they listened, put it into development and now finally in Inventor 2026 that solution has been implemented. You are able to create a custom Skey while creating and authoring the pipes and fittings, ensuring that your exported PCF from Inventor wil have all the correct mapping when creating your Io in AutoCAD Plant 3D

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