A few years ago Autodesk took the journey to modernise the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of Inventor, taking the approach creating a property panel and a breadcrumb type workflow when creating a feature.

This breadcrumb workflow essentially allows the user to have the appropriate tools in front of them instead of being presented with all the tools and not know what to click it could be quite confusing. IN previous versions of Inventor you had a dialog box with many tabs to navigate to get to your desired result.

Inventor 2026 continues that trend by adding property panels to the following.

Sheet Metal Contours – Inventor 2025

Sheet Metal Contours – Inventor 2026

As you can see in the above images, it is a much cleaner interface with Inventor 2026. Inventor 2025 has tabs which hide additional features. If you were not too familiar with Inventor, finding those additional features to get the contour flange that you want to model up would be more time consuming.

The Corner Round function has also been updated as in the below image. Inventor 2026 looks more in common with the normal standard fillet command. This makes it easier to identify and utilise features as it all looks common across the board especially when it comes to features similar. (Corner round is a fillet)

A UI update has also been included for the Punch Tool command. In the below image you will see the punch tool command for Inventor 2025 on the left and Inventor 2026 on the right. The punch tool includes a preview which updates when you modify the parameters as well as the ability to swap out the punch tool during the preview.