Autodesk Inventor
Re: Creating Expanded Metal Mesh
There are textures and color styles available in Inventor to "fake" expanded metal, without actually modelling it. Unless there is a specific reason you need the real geometry, I'd recommend using them (modifying as needed) to create your mesh. I used a sketch to create some geometry to use as a guide for scaling the texture to achieve the size I wanted.
Cutting the real geometry uses up a lot of memory, so don't do it unless you really need to.
If you need accurate weights, you can create a material style with a density that produces the average weight of the material (which you should be able to get from your supplier, probably in lb / sq ft).
I've set this up for a couple of our commonly used sizes (will add more as needed). I've attached one as an example. This version is set up for #9, 3/4" flattened expanded metal. I've also changed the primary color of the texture to Red (from the default Gray version), since most of our equipment is painted red.
Re: Creating Expanded Metal Mesh
I would describe it as "visually close," but won't guarantee dimensional accuracy. I took the opening width from some specs I had, drew a sketch with a line that long, and scaled the texture until it was close enough to look right. For my purposes, that's really all that was required.
The weight is correct, though. In fact, the only reason it is modeled as 12" x 12" was to verify the weight against the specs.
With regards to the drawing, you are correct. It will not show up unless you use shaded views on the drawing. On the drawings where we show these types of screens, our views typically are shaded anyway, so it's not a problem for us.
