The Autodesk Assistant is an interesting addition to Inventor. Many AI tools today allow users to create custom assistants, agents, or skills that can perform specific tasks based on predefined instructions. In practice, these features are often little more than reusable prompts that can be invoked when needed.
Inventor’s Auto Balloon tool is useful for generating balloons, but it is primarily designed as an interactive feature. In practice, this means working through a dialog, adjusting settings, and repeating those steps for each view. I built a iLogic rule that focuses on a different approach: a fast, single‑click action that produces a clean, predictable result without any dialog or manual tuning.
Last week we encountered an unexpected issue in one of our assemblies. It consists of two plates bolted together with a linear bolt pattern. During assembly, we found that the hole patterns did not align. By the final hole, the centerline mismatch had grown to 10 mm.
At first, this appeared to be a typical modeling or constraint error. However, the actual root cause proved to be far more subtle.
Autodesk recently released Inventor 2027. It is shipped with the Autodesk Assistant. It’s an add-in that ships with the product by default, but it’s not enabled out of the box. I was curious about what it can actually do. How helpful is it for day‑to‑day engineering work? And does it actually make modeling easier?
Last week was April 1st, and I created a small iLogic prank to surprise a few colleagues during their daily workflow. The rule is completely harmless and automatically restores the model to its original state. You can attach this rule to any of Inventor’s iLogic triggers, such as On Parameter Change, Before Save, After Open, or After Document Change.
With the release of Vault 2025.2, Autodesk introduced a new REST API for Vault. You can use Power Automate Desktop to interact with Vault through this API. In this post, I’ll walk you through how to trigger a custom job in the Vault job queue using Power Automate.
Inventor’s iProperties system includes some lesser known behaviors, especially when working with date fields and expression‑driven values, that can affect automation and data consistency. In this post, we’ll look at how Inventor treats the date properties as well as how expressions work behind the scenes in both the UI and the API.
In my last post, Accessing iProperties, we explored the basics of reading iProperties in Inventor. Now it’s time to go a level deeper. In this article, we’ll look at how to create, edit, and manage custom iProperties — both with iLogic and with the more powerful Inventor API.
Working with iProperties is a common task when automating Autodesk Inventor: managing metadata, preparing BOM exports, or enforcing naming rules. Developers typically access these properties through one of two interfaces: the Inventor API or the iLogic API. Although both expose the same underlying document data, they do so in noticeably different ways. The object models differ, the available property names are not always identical, and some operations are simpler in one API than the other.
Yesterday, I scrolled down the "Inventor Ideas" board and found this idea: "Virtual Component Library." It has 112 votes, so I guess that people would like this feature in Inventor. However, this idea was posted in 2012 and is still gathering support. Probably it will not be implemented any time soon. But with a small I logic rule you can implement this functionality yourself.
This is just a random post to showcase how to find all the properties of a (face) appearance. I created the rule to help someone on the Autodesk "Inventor Programming Forum". Someone else (or me) might find it useful in the future.
Autodesk Inventor, Vault, Git, C#, vb, .net, php HTML, css, js
University computer science.
HBO Mechanical engineer.
MBO Fine mechanics.
Programmer and
Mechanical engineer
at Kelvion
(2016 - 20..)
Mechanical engineer
at Strukton
(2009 - 2016)
Mechanical engineer
at RDG-engineering
(2007 - 2009)
CNC Programmer
at VMC
(2005 - 2007)
volunteer
at Taizé
(2007)
Objectgeoriënteerd analyseren en ontwerpen, Objectgeoriënteerd programmeren in Java, Webapplicaties: de clientkant, Databases, Security Aware Programmer, Web Security Specialist