Updates

Would like to thank you all for the kind messages and warm wishes. It has been a difficult time and I am still struggling to get back normality, trying to get back into routine.

About 12 weeks ago my father has passed away and I have been blown to pieces to a point where I didn’t felt like doing anything. I didn’t want to go back to work and I had to push myself really hard to do the usual, chores and routine.

The only thing that made sense and that kept me going was my family, playing with my son and spending as much time with them as I could.

Here is my son Aiden, 18 months old now.

Cheeky monkey

While being a contractor helps you keep active and prevents you from getting dull or complacent, it also means you need to carry on no matter what; no work, no pay. I had to keep going and provide for my family but it was really difficult at times.

I need to thank my friends, family and colleagues for support and understanding. This wasn’t totally unexpected but he really was a special person who has positively influenced everyone around him.

I haven’t been totally absent and I have been in contact with Autodesk on various subjects, one being Tube and Pipe. We have a plan forward and while I’ve gathered another 60 ideas on T&P it’s best we split the overhaul post and create individual requests for each one of them.

The original plan was to keep it all as a single entry and make the developers get the full picture but the negative comments are turning users away from T&P. What we need to understand is that some of my requests are referring to Inventor in general, others are my own imagination, and some of them are not to be found in any other pipe design software. While I wish my car had screen-in-screen mirrors and self adjusting dash lights it doesn’t make it a bad car and it’s certainly no indication on the performance of the vehicle.

Long time ago (about 13 years to be more exact) I have asked and older/experienced colleague what is the best CAD software and while it all depends on discipline / product / design you are doing his answer was far simpler:

“The best CAD software is THE ONE YOU KNOW”.

My reply is a simple comparison on my work place. The design office in am in Veolia is one of the few that uses Autodesk Inventor; default recommended package throughout the group is ProE/Creo but there are also Aveva PDMS users as well. This makes us one of the most productive offices as well because Inventor gives us the speed and flexibility to work in ways other cannot. For some of our projects we only get 5-10 hours design time and that includes, P&ID, plant layout, renderings, along with saving and sending in various formats, setting up the projects, drawing register, etc.

On the other extreme I am currently working on a project with equipment from ProE, vessels from SolidEdge, skids from SolidWorks, building components from Revit and Tekla via .ifc conversions, sketches from Autocad and I am adding Tube and Pipe with Autodesk Inventor. I then export it to A360 Glue (sort of navisworks in the cloud) via Navisworks Mange. Forgot to mention that the building has ReCap scans and we have imported the point clouds in Inventor for validating pipe routing and clearing clashes.

Other departments will need more time to setup the project and the libraries while we’ve finished the entire job.

Yes Inventor has room for improvement but the more users there are the better the software will get so don’t just discard it based on a list form a lunatic that has nothing better to do with his time and he posts all sort of crazy requests on Idea Station.

So what now? Will try and ease in, find my balance, one step at a time and see if I can get up to running speed again.

ADS.