Modelling with Inventor

[Derpy_Llama_]

So I am trying to make a model in Autodesk Inventor. Everything goes well until I try to export.

I have been told to export it as a .dae file, but Inventor 2010 cannot export as .dae

Can later versions like 2011 and up export as .dae or am I missing a plugin? And if so, where would I get the plugin?

I google searched a lot but I could not find out how to get inventor to export .dae files.

[DYJ]

I suggest you read through this thread first: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/39064-Use-of-AutoCad-for-3D-Modelling

But Inventor exports to .stl iirc that can be imported by blender and from there taken into unity and KSP.

[Greys]

Sort version of that link, CAD/CAE suites are not poly based, they handle the polys in the background so you don't have to and for what they are that's a good thing. Because you cannot deal with the polys it is not within the realm of posibility for inventor to export something that is ready to run in Unity unless you're going to put a solid uniform material on them.

As such you will have to import it through a program like Blender that is poly based to prepare the model in various ways.

Because Inventor is parametric it is going to be really inefficient in it's use of polys because it rebuilds the model dynamically for optimal accuracy to the features given the current viewport, so anything round, bendy, or even vaguely circular will have obscene numbers and the layouts won't necessarily be consistent or easy to work with.

Despite this, if you are familiar with Inventor it is a viable approach, and Blender is hardly straightforward (if you know how to use Blender you are not qualified to comment on the matter anymore). Starting with an imported model and learning how to fix it in Blender is a good way to go in my opinion, you won't have to know everything immediately and you can over time rebuild the model more and more until you're ready to make it from scratch. To make it easy on yourself make sure you avoid circles, fillets, revolves, and holes.