It depends how you define "Beginner"!

I have spend the past few days trying to find digestible tutorials for out-and-out beginners in Inventor. There are the tutorials which come with AI15 - the video ones - which clearly show the abilities of the tutor, but dazzle me . Some of these appear to be attempting to present something like the concept of relativity in a three-minute video.

There are a host of PDF tutorials which, I have no doubt, will be of inestimable value when I have a toddler's grasp of AI and would like to move from walk to run . Both types are written by well-intentioned folk who have simply forgotten that, in AI terms, I am barely at the crawling stage.

One tutorial includes this warning:

Before starting this tutorial, you should have been able to:

• Construct, constraint and dimension sketches

• Project geometry on sketch planes

• Extrude sketched profiles

• Revolve sketched profiles

• Loft sketched profiles

• Understand the concepts of work and placed features

• Understand how to manipulate the history tree in the browser

Far be it from me to criticise the author, rather I commend the author's clarity of thought because this list encapsulates what a beginner is looking for. The author is saying, "This tutorial is not for rank beginners - this is moving up a stage!" Unfortunately, I am a rank beginner and I want to learn the things on the list. It is fundamental concepts like this I have to master before I can move on to more impressive things.

Can somebody point me towards a BEGINNER'S tutorial for Autodesk Inventor?

Thanks

I'm pretty sure our colleague, JDMather, the resident Inventor guru, had posted previously links to such introductory courses; please try to do a review on his posts.

Inventor is a professional program and deserves (requires?) a professional level of preparation.

I recommend finding a class.

A competent instructor can show you stuff in 1-3 hrs that will take you 1-3 years to pick up on your own, and in my experience, if you try this on your own you are more likely to pick up a lot of bad habits rather than a strong modeling foundation.

If you are determined to do this on your own - pick up a classic mechanic drafting textbook (I use Giesecke et al Technical Drafting) and start modeling something from the book. Then attach your file here at each step of the way for instruction on how it should have been done.