Autodesk Releases Preview of Inventor Fusion for Mac

Back in January at Macworld, we noted that Autodesk was planning to bring its Inventor Fusion mechanical design software to the Mac. At the time, the company promised the a free technology preview of Inventor Fusion for Mac would be available in the coming weeks, with an official release to follow later.

Autodesk today announced that the free software preview is now available for download and will remain active through January 1, 2013.

Inventor Fusion is a free technology preview that enables creation of designs through intuitive direct manipulation tools. Our aim is to set a new standard for Assembly design, giving users greater control over designs without sacrificing productivity. Hopefully this technology preview will make it easier to open and edit 3D models from virtually any source and incorporate them into new or existing designs (such as in Autodesk Inventor). Your feedback will determine if we are correct in our thinking.

The system requirements for Inventor Fusion for Mac include most relatively recent Mac Pro, iMac, and MacBook Pro models with specific graphics options from AMD, NVIDIA or Intel. Autodesk has, however, indicated that users may still have success running the software on officially unsupported systems.

The release of the Inventor Fusion preview for Mac is the second major Mac-related announcement for Autodesk this week, following the company's unveiling of Smoke 2013, an updated version of its professional-level video editing and visual effects software for Mac. Smoke 2013 will be launching "later this fall" at a price of $3,495 per license, a significant discount from the $14,995 pricing on previous versions.