Deducting 20 for Tooling and 9 for Simulation only left 36 entries for basic Inventor and most of them involved part modeling. There was almost nothing for assemblies, and it seemed that no single item would make a good headline for a product review.
The really good news is that Autodesk’s Manufacturing group has gone for quality instead of quantity. There aren’t a lot of changes, but they are good ones. 

Figure 1: Inventor 2012 sports a new Marking Menu system.

The closest item to an attention-grabber is the new “Marking Menu” functionality. I never have liked ribbon menus. Inventor’s is still better than most applications, but the new marking menu has almost eliminated my use of the ribbon. To invoke the marking menu just right-click anywhere in the graphic screen. This brings up a halo and a list of context-sensitive commands. Simply move your cursor to the desired command, click, and it’s running.

Next, the mini-toolbars that appear during operations such as Fillet, Revolve, Extrude, and so on have been significantly changed. They initially appear as just one or two mini-toolbars, but when you move your cursor near them then several more pop up. They now include so many actions that the related dialog boxes are almost never needed, so they initially appear as just a small bar with a drop arrow to open them. This saves screen real estate while you are working.


Figure 2: The mini toolbars fade away...

When working on a complex part or assembly we often need to select a face that is hidden behind another. Worse yet is when it is hidden several levels down, deep within the part or assembly. In previous releases you pause for a second on the outermost face and Inventor brings up the “two green arrows” to let you scroll down through the buried possibilities.
In Inventor 2012, however, just pause for a couple of seconds on the outermost face. Inventor then brings up a drop list of all the faces that are hidden behind the outermost one. Scrolling your cursor down the list highlights each face in turn to allow verification before the final selection. 

Figure 3: ...until you need them.
When you select a face for a new sketch, do you also run the View Face tool so the sketch plane faces you square on? Inventor 2012 now does this automatically.

When was the last time you had a feature fail because you edited something else? You move a face and now a fillet fails. With Inventor 2012 you can simply hover the mouse over the browser entry and the model displays the “last known good” version of it.

Have you ever wondered what a particular feature does in your part? Yes, you can rename features in the browser tree, but Inventor 2012 can also supply additional information to indicate the type of feature and its size. A simple “Extrusion 5” label can now automatically say “Extrusion 5 (Join x 1.500 in)” 

Inventor can take a while for to perform all the calculations necessary for a precise display of 2D drawing views of a very complex part or assembly. Inventor 2012 solves this with a new “high speed drawing views” capability. You don’t need to wait for Inventor 2012 to finish the precise calculations. Instead, a fast raster image is displayed so you can view the drawing and even add many types of annotation during the precise calculation process.

A hot-button topic in the 3D CAD world these days involves the relative merits of history-based versus history-free modeling. Inventor 2012 can now play either game. Fusion, a former Autodesk Labs experimental program, has graduated to a full-fledged application and is included with Inventor 2012.

It can be invoked from within Inventor 2012 or it can run as a stand-alone. A “prismatic” Inventor part can be sculpted it into “organic” flowing shapes. When you return to Inventor the edits have been added as an Alias Freeform object. Unfortunately it seems to have no connection to the part as it existed before this point, but new Inventor features can be added and constrained to the Alias Freeform object.

Figure 4: This was a brick before I Fusioned It (Hey, if “To Google” is a verb…)

The Realistic visual style includes a new Ray Tracing option as shown below. Photo-realistic shadows, reflections, and diffractions display in “real time” as you work. It can be interesting, but it does slow things down a bit in that it needs about 3 to 5 seconds to re-calculate whenever the view changes. Interestingly, this seems to be almost independent of part or assembly complexity.

Interoperability changes in Inventor 2012 include a new Rhino translator and updates to support the latest versions of several other brands. The BIM Exchange and Revit Connector capabilities have also been improved.

Individually, the changes to Inventor 2012 may seem minor but they quickly add up to a major improvement in how you use.