Thinking of changing to inventor

currently i use sketchup and autocad to design PV systems on roofs

i use sketchup to calculate shading - that will stay

i use autocad to make instalaltion drawings

i also use sketchup to design the structures and make detailed drawings, made from steel, aluminium and custom profiles. would inventor help me in this area? is it a suitable program for designing structures? as there anything better? ideally it can do FEA as well (once we had a guy using solid works to do a FEA on custom parts that now are changing)

I use inventor to do latticed structures, here is an example (see pic). To be honest inventor is not the best for structure (I mean buildings and things like that with W shapes or anlges etc.), is more focus on modeling pieces, in your case, PV systems are symilar to mechanical pieces and inventor would do the job. The greatest advantage is that inventor is exact so you may model this as real life and after modeling your piece you can get your assembly and fabrication drawings from the piece instead of doing the job twice (modeling and then pass to 2D). If you do further changes to your model, this changes are reflected on your final drawings, because every thing is linked. Besides you can get an exact bill of mats including bolts.

I think you should try it, as allways when we change to another software is a little hard because we are customed to the way that we do the things on the past or those things that we have already mastered. But after that transition you might find lots of beneficts.

The only issue or what im not sure if inventor does it, is that shading calculation. I know invantor can do some renderisation but dont know about how to put lights and things like that. Sketchup is nice in this area because you can choose the hour of the day, if is winter or summer even an exact day if I recall.

For structure (buildings) I recommend Tekla or Graitec, but PV systems I think inventor would be the software

thanks great reply

sketchup for shading in the company will not change because our sales team manage to use it and that is a huge plus for me . not so technical drawings where only the placement of panels is important and everything else is standard then sketchup wins here.

two things you mentioned that are ideal for me is using one software to change from 3d to 2d

also a BOM is something worth looking into, so thanks for your reply i'll give it a go. anyway i also like that challenge of learing new software