Free download helps engineers speed up time-to-market by making rapid design changes through direct manipulation.

San Rafael, CA— Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK) is offering a free download of its Inventor Fusion Technology Preview on Autodesk Labs.

Autodesk Inventor Fusion is new Digital Prototyping technology that unites the power and control of parametric, history-based modeling with the speed and ease of use of direct, history-free modeling, enabling users to choose the modeling approach that is right for the task at hand. The technology preview is the first step in delivering the full vision of Inventor Fusion to engineers everywhere.

“Our manufacturing customers have told us that direct modeling is opening up new opportunities to accelerate product development. However, they’ve also told us that they don’t see the need for the power and control of history-based parametric modeling going away,” says Robert “Buzz” Kross, senior vice president for the Manufacturing Industry Group at Autodesk.

“We’re developing Inventor Fusion technology as part of a larger effort to combine the best of both disciplines to further improve the product design process.”

Inventor Fusion Technology Preview is ideal for companies that need to make rapid, history-free design changes to a model through direct manipulation but also have many years worth of feature- and history-based data and design intent that they need to access, use and maintain.

The June 2009 preview is the first step toward Autodesk’s goal of providing seamless bidirectional parametric and direct workflows to users by allowing them to adopt the modeling approach that best fits their needs in a single application.

The company is planning a second technology preview this fall that will enable users to perform direct modeling for fast changes and then see their changes updated in the model’s parametric feature history, maintaining crucial design intent.

For more information visit www.autodesk.com and www.inventorfusion.com