Thursday

Autodesk, Autodesk Inventor Tutorials

Experimenting with Inventor 2009

Before Independence Day 2009 rolls around, why not practice using the Decal command in Autodesk Inventor to wrap your country’s flag? Here’s a tutorial about how to do that, using my country’s flag.

The Decal command helps us in placing any labels, names, paintings, logos, barcodes, and warranty seals on a part model or assembly model. The general procedure would be to insert an image in sketch, then use constraints followed by dimensions to position the sketch correctly. Decal is applied mostly to extruded surfaces.

Let’s go ahead with the tutorial.
Step 1: Download your country flag (.bmp file) and save it in a folder.
Step 2: Now open Inventor and select part module.

Figure 1

Step 3: Now create a rectangle with dimensions of 66mm X 45mm as shown in Figure 2. This dimension should match with the size of the flag image.

Figure 2

Step 4: Now extrude the rectangle of dim (66mm X 45mm) with a height of 2 mm by using the finish sketch (Figure 3) and selecting extrude command (Figure 4).

Figure 3

Figure 4

Step 5: Now enter the height as 2mm in the extrude dialog box.

Figure 5

Step 6: Now select the work plane option from the part feature dialog box as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 06

Step 7: Now select the face and offset the work plane by 5mm or more as shown in figure 7.

Figure 07

Step 8: Now select sketch on work plane and insert the image (your country flag) from the folder in which you have saved it as shown in Figures 8 and 9.

Figure 08

Figure 09

Step 9: Now place the image, which is a bmp file, as shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10

Step 10: Now right-click and select Finish Sketch and select the decal option from part feature.

Step 11: Now select wrap to face and later select the image first and then the face where the decal image is to be placed.

Figure 12

Step 12: Now you will notice that the image is wrapped on the face of the part file as shown below in Figure 13.

Figure 13

Step 13: Now you can hide the visibility of the work plane and notice only the part file with the image decal on it.

Figure 14

Step 14: Now you notice that work plane is hidden as shown in Figure 15 and click on look at the front face to get the image in the front view as shown in Figure 16.

Figure 15

Figure 16

Step 15: I hope you can do the part model as shown in Figure 17.

Figure 17

In this way you can decal any file with the following extension: *.bmp, *.doc, or *.xls format. Now go ahead and decal the world map on a sphere!

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