Inventor 2014 was officially released yesterday. Here’s a quick overview of the API enhancements for this release. I’ll go into more detail of some of them in later posts.
- Support for dimension styles. The API previously had minimal support for all of the settings associated with a dimension style. This was also one of the highest requested enhancements from the yearly API survey. With Inventor 2014 all of the settings are now available from the API, with the exception of those on the “Notes and Leaders” tab. The notes and leaders settings are quite a bit more complicated and will need to wait until later.
- API support for the new types of sketch curves. Inventor 2013 introduced two new curve types; control point and equation curves in both 2D and 3D sketches. There is now full API support for both types in both 2D and 3D sketches.
- API support for 3D intersection curves. Inventor has supported the ability to create an intersection curve between two surfaces for a long time. This capability is now also supported through the API.
- Inventor 2014 introduces some new sketch command for drawing slots. There are also API methods that provide the equivalent capability to the commands.
- Inventor 2014 introduces a new feature that can significantly improve performance for very large assemblies called assembly Express Mode. There is full API support for this.
- Another new feature in Inventor 2014 is assembly joints. Joints are a more user-friendly type of constraint. An assembly can use both the traditional constraints and joints to define the relationships between parts. There is full API support for joints.
- Inventor and the API now support creating work points at the centers of spheres.
- The API supports a new enhancement to the boundary patch feature where the weight, or smoothness, can be controlled for each selected edge.
- The API now supports the ability to imprint solids. This takes two bodies as input and creates two new bodies where the faces on the new bodies have been split where any of the faces were overlapping between the bodies. This is important for analysis applications to control where nodes on their mesh are created.
- The API now fully supports consistent materials. Consistent materials was introduced with Inventor 2013. There wasn’t time to do the equivalent API work at the time but there was some work done so the Material and RenderStyle objects would work with consistent materials. This works ok but has some issues because the old Material and RenderStyle objects are not a one-for-one match to the new consistent material functionality. With Inventor 2014 new API functionality has been introduced that fully supports consistent materials.
- There is now API support for Pack & Go.
- A few updates were made to the BIM exchange API in reaction to some enhancements made in the product.
- Inventor now supports VBA 7. VBA 7 is able to run natively on both 32 and 64-bit Windows. The previous VBA only supported 32-bit Windows, so this is great news for those running 64-bit Windows. With earlier version of Inventor on a 64-bit system, in order to support VBA at all, Inventor would spawn a separate 32-bit process that would host VBA. This is no longer required and as a result there is no longer any delay when accessing VBA and your macros will also run much faster. As a side benefit, the scroll button now scrolls the code window.
-Brian
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