I got briefed about this last Friday (as did the rest of the press/blogger community I’m sure), but I wanted to wait till it was up and live on the Autodesk Labs web-site and I’d had a chance to play with it. When Autodesk publicly and officially announced Inventor Fusion Technology Preview, much was made of the name and the aims of the technology.

This is Autodesk’s answer to the likes of Synchronous Technology, Instant3D and all the other non-history-based modelling technologies out there. What the company has focused on, with both the messaging and the name, was the ability to rationalise together traditional feature+history-based model edits with the history-less modelling practices founds in Inventor Fusion.

Essentially you could edit a traditional Inventor model in Fusion, without using features of any kind, then pass it back to Inventor to rationalise the changes and update the history tree to integrate those changes back into the history-based model. This isn’t the history-tree appending method used by the likes of NX and SolidWorks, but something more integrated at the very core of your modelling history. The problem was, that capability wasn’t available in the first Technology Preview - which many missed. That changes today with the introduction of the Change Manager add-on for Inventor alongside Tech Preview 2.0.

Today, Tech Preview 2 has gone live and you can download it and play with it. Again, you have the ability to try Inventor Fusion if you’re from the qualifying countries. But you’ll need to be a suscriptions customer using Inventor 2010 Subscriptions release if you want to try the Change Manager. The two peices of code (fusion 2.0 and Change Manage) are delivered as separate zips/installs.

It’s also worth remember that separate applications are not the end goal of this process. This is a Technology Preview, and separating out the Fusion tech from core inventor, allows the team to play with and distribute the code and see how users like the interaction between the two different types of modeling methodology - but the end goal is that Fusion technology will be built directly into Inventor, not sold as a separate application.

We’ll be trying it out later on today, once we’ve updated Inventor to the latest release (without which the change manager won’t work). There are also some new additions and changes to the core Inventor Fusion tools as well, so stayed tuned for more. In the meantime, here’s some video fun for you.