With the release of Inventor 2020, Autodesk has introduced a new unwrap feature.  To some designers this probably won’t be all that useful but to manufacturers of composite materials that in the past had to use 3^rd party methods for creating flat patterns, you will love this one!

The unwrap tool is located on the create panel of the 3D model tab in the part environment.

Unwrap can be used to create a flat surface profile of any faces selected from a normal part.  Whether complex geometry created by surface modelling or a simple solid model this feature works well.

The menu has options to select faces, along with a check box for auto face chain in order to select tangential faces automatically.  Once the faces are selected, a projected flat pattern appears that can be aligned to the first face selected with projected at origin checked, or parallel to the XY plane if not.  The behaviour panel allows a linear or rigid result to be based on an edge selection. The last tick box allows the result body to be merged into a single surface or split per face selected.

Conclusion

This is a great addition to Inventors toolset when looking into design challenges like piping developments and flat profiles of complex geometry.  The result surface can also be exported to .dxf or .dwg files for downstream workflows.