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The new features of Autodesk’ flagship 3D product development application, Inventor version 11, was widely rumoured to have improved surfacing, together with the wiring up of the final parts of its MechSoft ‘functional design’ acquisition. Here is the insights as to what to expect in what looks like a major update.

Large Assembly Management	Assembly Configurations
- Realize the benefits of 3D design when developing very large assemblies. With Level of Detail Representations you have full control over which parts of your project are loaded into memory when you open the model. The capacity meter enables you to monitor memory consumption as you work so you can quickly open a huge project file to review the assembly structure and then choose to open only those subassemblies needed to get the job done.	- New assembly configurations make it fast and efficient to design and document product families by defining variations from a master assembly. With assembly configurations, you can exclude or substitute individual components and make changes to dimension and constraint values. Then document the entire product family using the new Table tool to add a parameter table in your assembly drawing.
Sculpt Tool	AutoDrop
Use the new Sculpt tool to create 3D shapes by quickly and easily combining closed sets of surfaces. Incorporate imported surface data into your design using the Sculpt tool to modify existing parts by adding or removing material.	- When you need to add many standard components to a design, AutoDrop boosts your productivity by providing intelligent component insertion with one-click placement. AutoDrop selects the part with the correct dimension as you move the cursor over valid geometry. Graphical preview and intelligent 3D grips provide incremental adjustment based on sizes available in the Content Center.