The Autodesk Inventor geometry interface also supports the Selective Update feature.

Assembly parts and sub-assemblies that are hidden, suppressed or disabled in Autodesk Inventor are automatically excluded from import.

FaceColor attributes in Autodesk Inventor will now be separated based on their assigned value when imported as named selections. A model that may have 3 Face entities assigned red and 2 Face entities that were assigned blue which previously would have imported as a single named selection titled FaceColor, including all five faces, will now import as two named selections, FaceColor:Red (3 faces) and FaceColor:Blue (2 faces).

Ansys Workbench automatically locks the length unit in the part or assembly to centimeters, which is the unit used internally by Autodesk Inventor. No adjustment of length unit is necessary or possible. The Ansys Mechanical application user can change the unit system for display of the Ansys Mechanical application data.

Specific to Ansys DesignModeler

To successfully import parts into the Ansys DesignModeler application, you may need to suppress the elliptical features from the tree in Autodesk Inventor.

Large models (up to 499999m from the origin in any direction) created in Autodesk Inventor can be imported to the DesignModeler application. Note that the DesignModeler application reports the bounding box of 500 km for such entities, that is the tolerance for Autodesk Inventor is 1 m.

Autodesk indicates that Shrinkwrap of Inventor native assemblies can produce non manifold bodies. In this case the Inventor body can display normally in the CAD's model tree, but is not expected to import cleanly into DesignModeler due to gaps where small faces were removed.

Bodies imported into Inventor from external sources can produce non-manifold solids, which load into DesignModeler with less than okay status and missing faces. Right-clicking on these bodies within Inventor will provide access to the Body Repair tools offered within the CAD. These utilities can be used to identify and heal errors in the Inventor geometry, which in turn can improve translation into DesignModeler.

When transferring geometry from Autodesk Inventor to the Workbench using the associative geometry interface, a specific representation is not loaded into Autodesk Inventor when opening a document via Pseudo-Reader mode. If a specific representation is required, it should be explicitly set in an active Autodesk Inventor session prior to attach.

DSPlugInAICOM Add-in  —  The first time you start Inventor after installing/configuring the plug-in you may be presented with a dialog box asking whether you would like to load the DSPlugInAICOM add-in. Here if you click Allow the Associative Interface will automatically load in the future without the message box appearing again.

Decompose Disjoint Geometry  —  Each component shell will be imported as a distinct body. Decomposition is only supported for solid bodies, and disjoint surface bodies such as face patches and work surfaces will not be broken apart.

Import and Mesh Efficiency  —  To improve import and mesh efficiency the import or part instancing.  is supported. As a result, a break in associativity is expected when performing an update for models from versions of Workbench earlier than 16.0. The work-around is to disable the Instancing preference prior to refreshing the geometry from CAD, with the downside of losing out on the performance improvements yielded via Instancing.

Model States Considerations  —  Any update from an Inventor Model State different from the version currently loaded into a downstream Ansys application such as Mechanical, Discovery, SpaceClaim, DesignModeler, or Fluent has potential to result in broken loads, boundary conditions or other simulation entities assigned to a specific topological entity or part. This can be mitigated by defining Named Selections in the Inventor model and scoping simulation items to these Named Selections. For more information regarding creation of Named Selection see documentation about using the Named Selection Manager.

Named Selections Restrictions  —  The Autodesk Inventor Plug-in does not support the creation of Named Selections beginning with numeric characters, containing spaces, the slash (/) or backslash (\) characters.

Plug-In Availability Considerations  —  Due to the architecture of the CAD's Add-In manager, the Autodesk Inventor geometry interface will automatically load into the Inventor sessions of all users when any administrative user has configured the geometry interface only to be available for their account. This is the case even when you have not configured the geometry interface for himself/herself and a global configuration has not been performed to enable the plug-in to run for all users. When encountering such a state it may be possible to import geometry from an active Inventor session, but any attempts to attach or refresh geometry without Inventor running will fail.

Reference Key  —  If, upon attaching, you receive the message Failed to get reference key, the attaching process will continue, but an associative relation during update cannot be guaranteed.

Limitations

The following limitation is specific to the Ansys 2024 R2 Associative Geometry Interface to Inventor. There is a known library conflict with earlier releases of this Plug-In, which will cause Inventor to crash when attempting to load 2024 R2 Ansys Plug-in when earlier release of the plugin is configured to load into Inventor.

Use the following procedure to enable these versions to be loaded side-by-side in Inventor.

See the Autodesk Inventor Errors Related to CAD Integration section in CAD Integration Troubleshooting for detailed information.