The Ultimate Guide to Turn Inventor Files into Omniverse SimReady USD Content

Autodesk Inventor is a computer-aided design application for 3D mechanical design, simulation, visualization, and documentation developed by Autodesk. It provides parametric, direct edit, freeform modeling, and assembly capabilities with integrated tools for machine design, sheet metal, simulation, and manufacturing workflows. It is a file format mostly used for Professional 3D CAD software for mechanical design, simulation, visualization, and documentation.

Omniverse supports various file formats. However, the native file format is USD, which is the officially recommended file format for best performance.

USD (Universal Scene Description) is the primary format for Omniverse SimReady data, it enables 3D assets to be used in simulation environments such as NVIDIA Omniverse, PhysX, and more. For this to work properly, USD assets must adhere to the USD standard, and ideally bring metadata that helps to inform downstream simulation use cases about various simulation-relevant properties of the 3D asset.

There are various ways to generate USD files, but especially when starting from non-simulation formats like Inventor, it is not easy to perform a good conversion. Additional required steps might include material assignment (in case realistic materials are desired) and related steps like UV generation, but also metadata transfer from the original file to the final Omniverse SimReady USD asset.

With RapidPipeline, the process of generating NVIDIA Omniverse SimReady USD content from Inventor files is easy:

1. Download RapidPipeline Twin Studio, or one of the RapidPipeline 3D tool plugins (free trial available). Alternatively, you can also use RapidPipeline directly in the browser.
2. Perform the conversion from Inventor to USD. Store or download the resulting USD file, it's ready to use!
3. If you'd like to scale up the process, simply get in touch to acquire a license for the RapidPipeline 3D Processor, running as powerful batch processing tool that turns your entire library of Inventor files (or other files) into Omniverse SimReady USD content.

Here is the link for more details.

To get started with 3D data conversion and optimization today, sign up for a free account!

If you have any questions, feel free to chat with our human team.