In your typical design office you will have various people doing various jobs. You will have your Engineers working out the details so that a product does not fail. You will have your Draughtsmen/women sharing the workload between 3D modelling and 2D technical documentation.
When creating 2D documentation from a 3D Inventor model it is not necessary to have an Inventor license. Autodesk has come up with a workflow that benefits both your company and your expenditure for software for the year. Inventor has an option to save all 2D documentation in a .dwg format. Please be aware that this is an Inventor DWG which is NOT the same as an AutoCAD DWG.
The Inventor DWG can be accessed from within both AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT using the normal File – Open operation from within AutoCAD.
Saving into the Inventor Format is simple as the file is native to Inventor. You will notice when creating a new Template in Inventor for a 2D drawing you will have the 2 options – Standard.idw and Standard.dwg.
Please note that when accessing the DWG in AutoCAD you are not able to edit any of the geometry that was creating in Inventor when setting up the views and any of the dimensions or text that has been added. You will however be able to add more dimensions and text which will in turn reflect back into Inventor when the file is reopened in Inventor.
To create the AutoCAD DWG you will need to export the file using the Inventor dwg export wizard. This cuts the link between the 3D model and creates a stand alone DWG which can be modified in AutoCAD after opening.
