Now let's look at several of the new features in R2 that particularly caught my eye. In my previous review, I noted that R1 had no real exploded-view capabilities. Developers realized that exploded views are generally not a precision engineering document, but instead almost invariably a visual aid to help understand how an assembly goes together. They saw little need for the precision numeric input that other modelers require when you tweak and finetune the position of parts in an exploded view. All you need to do is drag and drop the parts until the view looks right.
Inventor generates explosion trails automatically.
The explosion process remembers its history, so you can come back at any time and run the sequence backward and forward as desired. You can also create a standard AVI animation file to show the assembly and disassembly sequence. Part and parcel Part modeling includes several new functions. Within an assembly, you can split one part into two single parts. The next item looks like a catch-up, but it has a twist.