Okino Ships Certified Autodesk Inventor 2010 CAD Conversion System for 3ds Max, Maya, Lightwave, XSI & All Major Downstream 3D File Formats

Okino's Industry Standard PolyTrans Provides Robust Support for Converting Autodesk Inventor 2010 files (and all other major CAD file formats) into the newest DCC/Animation Package Releases.

Toronto, Ontario - Okino Computer Graphics, a leading provider and pioneer of data translation solutions to the DCC/Animation and enterprise Fortune 1000 markets, announced today that its currently shipping software products have received the "Autodesk Inventor 2010 Certification". Okino has been a registered Autodesk developer since 1995 and has been shipping this completely robust and error-free Autodesk Inventor conversion pipeline since Inventor v5.

Certification by Autodesk, as per the "Inventor Certified Applications Program" validates the overall completeness and robustness of the Okino Inventor importer solution again. The certification is made by Autodesk's Inventor support staff by performing a series of strict tests for adherence and conformance to the Inventor API, robustness, completeness and overall design quality.

Please refer to this URL on the Okino WEB site for the Autodesk Inventor solutions page: http://www.okino.com/solutions/autodesk_inventor.htm

The Autodesk Inventor solution from Okino allows crack-free geometry, hierarchy (assembly data) and materials to be transferred cleanly and robustly from native disk-based Autodesk Inventor files or from a running copy of the Autodesk Inventor directly into any Okino data-conversion-compliant program, such as PolyTrans, NuGraf, 3ds Max and Maya (via native plug-ins), EON Reality software, MAXON Cinema-4D, Visual Components' 3DCreate, NGRAIN, and dozens of other packages as outlined below.

"Okino's software products are industry standards used world wide by almost every major corporation with robustness second to none," said Robert Lansdale, President & CEO of Okino Computer Graphics, Inc. "Since 1988 our entire company philosophy has been to provide the best of experiences for the import of large CAD assemblies into Okino software where the assembly data can be manipulated and viewed in real time, optimized, composed, reduced, tagged with materials and rendered with ease. Our software is also the industry standard for the conversion and re-purposing of CAD data to all major animation programs and downstream 3D file formats. Downstream uses include product documentation and manual creation, animation and rendering software, visual communication and review of data, and for accessing simpler and easier to manipulate versions of the original CAD datasets. Okino's NuGraf and PolyTrans products provide the "swiss army knife" of features, functionality and problem solving capabilities that the Autodesk Inventor user had not had access to before."

Major Benefits of the Inventor Importer to Okino Customers

- Import complete assemblies (including assembly cuts and patterned geometry, as well as multiple sub-assemblies) from a live running copy of Autodesk Inventor, or from native Autodesk Inventor .iam and .ipt files on disk (no copy of Autodesk Inventor required for this latter feature).

- Autodesk Inventor assemblies can be imported directly into Maya (using the PolyTrans-for-Maya native plug-in system) or directly into 3ds Max (using the PolyTrans-for-MAX native plug-in system). The native PolyTrans plug-in systems for 3ds Max and Maya have been refined for well over a decade, specifically for importing large CAD assembly models.

- The ability to quickly transfer assembly data into Okinos' NuGraf product for interactive scene manipulation, real-time OpenGL shaded views and object manipulation, complex material assignment, 2D bitmap and 3D procedural texture assignment, and rendering by Okino's stable, proven and fast scanline or multi-threaded ray tracing renderers. Once inside NuGraf (or PolyTrans), the data can be easily re-exported to any of the supported Okino 3D file formats.

- Okino's "CAD Scene and Hierarchy Optimization System" has been integrated right into the Autodesk Inventor importer. This is most important when importing large CAD models into 3ds Max, Maya, XSI or Lightwave. These animation packages can have performance problems when the source CAD model is large, and/or has a large number of individual parts (which is often the case with the BREP model topology of data provided by Autodesk Inventor).

- Complete control over material parameter modification on an automatic basis. Many CAD systems like Autodesk Inventor have basic material parameters (like color, ambient + diffuse shading coefficients, opacity, etc) but when they are transferred over to a rendering and animation system they often look "too bright" or "highly ambient". This can be expected and is quite normal. The material tweak parameters easily allow such saturated shading values to be automatically compensated for.

The Autodesk Inventor to Okino Software Data Conversion Process

When importing part or assembly data from a live running copy of Autodesk Inventor, the data is transferred from Autodesk Inventor to the Okino side of the pipeline using the Autodesk Inventor "Automation Server Interface". This is an exposed set of functions which Autodesk Inventor "publishes" to the outside world. Okino's Autodesk Inventor importer queries all the part, assembly and material data from the running copy of Autodesk Inventor using this COM interface. Such a pipeline is exemplified in this diagram:

Autodesk has also created a smaller stand-alone "Inventor View" application which exposes this COM interface to Okino software. This allows the Okino importer to read in Inventor .iam assembly files and .ipt part files directly from disk without requiring a local resident copy of Inventor to be installed on your machine.