So what is Digital Prototyping
The basic concept of Digital Prototyping is to test a virtual, yet complete product before it’s built.
Digital Prototyping lets you create, optimise and validate an accurate 3D simulation of your product designs. Using a digital model throughout the design, engineering and manufacturing phases will have a big impact on your business.
- Build fewer physical prototypes
- Get to market ahead of the competition
- Develop innovative products
- Minimise the risk of failure
- Improve communication and collaboration
- Reduce design and production costs
How is Digital Prototyping different from 3D design?
3D design is all about looking at the form and fit of product components – and automating the creation of drawings from your model.
Digital prototyping starts with defining form and fitting parts together, but it quickly moves beyond this into assessing:
- the way things move;
- whether or not they fail;
- how components interact with pneumatic and electric subsystems.
Test new concepts
Digital Prototyping lets you explore ideas and test design concepts before anything is built.
Reduce design time
Using digital prototypes helps you get products to market faster with fewer physical prototypes.
Cut production costs
With a digital prototype all your design decisions are based on accurate simulations and analysis, rather than intuition, so you can be sure a solution will work when it goes into production.
Not just for the big guns
You don’t have to build cars, planes or large industrial machinery to use Digital Prototyping to get to market faster with more innovative designs. Autodesk’s flexible solutions can be scaled to suit any business – and any budget.
Proven success
Digital Prototyping allows Gottwalk Port Technology to develop and maintain a single digital model, created in Inventor, which can be used in all stages of production.
“We evaluated several 3D applications and quickly agreed on Autodesk® Inventor®, mainly because it is so easy to use. Prototypes as we used to know them practically do not exist for us anymore…(they) are digital today, and we have an indicator for that: it used to take at least ten prototyping cycles until we reached that stage of maturity. Now we can start serial production after a mere three."
-Rolf Pflaumann, Head of Engineering Support, Gottwald Port Technology, Germany
