Autodesk is now offering a free download of its Inventor Fusion Technology Preview on Autodesk Labs.

The company describes Inventor Fusion as its new digital prototyping technology, uniting the power and control of parametric, history-based modeling with the speed and ease of use of direct, history-free modeling.

Autodesk said it enables users to choose the modeling approach that is right for the task at hand.

The technology is said to be deal for companies that need to make rapid, history-free design changes to a model through direct manipulation but also have many years worth of feature- and history-based data and design intent that they need to access, use and maintain.

Unlike Inventor 2010, Inventor Fusion doesn't rely on history.

Features are still very much an intrinsic part of the application, but it doesn't carry with it the headache of history recalculation when features are edited.

Robert Kross, senior vice president for the Manufacturing Industry Group at Autodesk, said direct modeling is opening up new opportunities for manufacturers to accelerate product development.

"However, customers have also told us that they don't see the need for the power and control of history-based parametric modeling going away.

"We're developing Inventor Fusion technology as part of a larger effort to combine the best of both disciplines to further improve the product design process."

This preview is said to be the first step toward Autodesk's goal of providing seamless bidirectional parametric and direct workflows to users by allowing them to adopt the modeling approach that best fits their needs in a single application.

The company is planning a second technology preview later this year that will enable users to perform direct modeling for fast changes and then see their changes updated in the model's parametric feature history, maintaining crucial design intent.

The download is a standalone program that does not interfere with Inventor; the released version will be integrated into Inventor.