I learned Inventor by just messing around with it... a lot of it is simple , and self explanatory.

Now MAX on the other hand...:rolleyes:

during the preseason, the college mentors taught inventor to themselves and learned along the way throughout the pre season training. then we went and set up many weeks worth of workshops in order to get all the technical HS members CAD/Inventor savvy. it really worked out well. this is one of the best organized and design friendly robots we have had and its all due to Inventor. many of the kids are extremely profficient w. Inventor now and the rest of the tech team is competant in it.

personally, i learned Inventor pretty much through our advisor project. each pre season the advisors give themselves a project to accomplish. this year it was designing a tank-tread drive train. i did most of that Inventor work and really got to know it. also, learning any CAD package well is just hours and hours in front of the computer working on it. I was one of the main CAD guys this year so that gave me a lot of practice and learning. now I am off to bigger and better CAD packages. this semester i took a computer graphics technologies class in CATIA and it was awesome.

-Raj-

Project Lead The Way is awesome… it introduced me to great programs like Inventor :). Then again, it also introduced me to evil ones like MasterCAM. :mad:

To all you PTLW people: What classes have you taken/are you taking?
I’m currently in CIM and POE, I took IED last year and can’t wait for Digital Electronics next year :D

i have taken cad2, cim, Digital Electronics, POE, and am taking EDD next year!

~Mike

Well, in relation to this, I've taken Mechanical Drafting 1 & 2, CAD 1 & 2, and if I get into CAD Engineering next year, I'll be learning to use inventor. I've seen people use it, but I haven't used it yet although I really want to.

You'd be amazed how much nicer Inventor is over AutoCAD. Yes, the commands do seem rather bass-ackwards after learning AutoCAD, but it's so much easier to do 3D modeling in Inventor. CAD just sortof cheats 3d. It can do it, but it's much more suited to 2D. Inventor, though, was actually designed for 3D work. Having used both, I must say I prefer Inventor. It's just nicer to work with.

Yeah, while watching someone use Inventor, I find it very similar to 3dsmax. In other words, the way everything is set up. Autocad doesn't really create really good 3d models unlike 3dsmax and Inventor. Well, I guess I'll just have to wait til next year to use it. I'm supposed to be getting a copy of it from one of my friends so maybe I can play with it to see how the program works.

Your team should have a copy. It was included in the Autodesk box, along with 3DS Max. If someone is using yours, well, I don't know what to tell you, but I'm sure you can find a way ;)

Well, you see, our previous animators kind of, you could say, took the program for themselves and kept it. They are no longer on the team but I think they gave it back, that is, a few weeks after the GLR.

I learned it from a fellow student who learned it by going through the tutorials. The incentive for me to learn it is that if I can draw our whole transmission design in Inventor I can get the money to build it.

PLTW, however, i think that i have learned more just fooling around on my own than from the actual lessons in that class. Inventor is really a "learn by fooling around" type of program, unlike AutoCAD or 3DS Max.