"Rotoscope" or reference photos possible in Inventor?

[steambc]

Notice: Nutshell is at the end. I'm all excited about using Inventor so I've included a little unnecessary gushing...

I just installed and started using Inventor Pro and I'm blown away by the ease of use.

Coming from several other 3D modeling programs, I'm used to being able to place a reference image (sometimes inaccurately called a rotoscope) in the background of a drawing plane in order to be able to trace the shape accurately.

Is this possible with Inventor? I searched around but didn't find a way.

Just as an example, in the real-world I'm currently restoring a Whip car (the amusement park ride) from the early 1920s. It's going to be a living room chair. I would like to be able to play with visualizing color combos so I would like to model the Whip car and then change the colors around until I hit on something I like.

The shape of the car is rather unique and a top-down reference image would certainly be helpful in accurately replicating the basic shape of the car. By now you guys have figured out that I have lots of experience with creating models in 3D modeling/animation packages but relatively little with CAD, and I'm sure you can detect my amateur way of expressing my question. I apologize for that as I don't yet know the proper terminology, but I will learn fast.

Thanks to any and all who can help me. I am absolutely delighted with Inventor and am so enthused to be learning it. I love the precision of CAD (as compared to looser character and object modeling) and I can see that Inventor utilizes an incredibly intuitive and well-thought-out interface. Truly impressive to a guy who is normally very jaded about interfaces and workflow.

I'm all over the place in this post because I feel like a kid in a candy store, but to nutshell it:

Is it possible to place reference images in the background in order to trace out the shape of real-world objects?

Thanks again!

[rdyson]

What I do:

Start a new sketch on the front view, insert the image corresponding to the front (Sketch>Insert>Image.) Rename the sketch "Front"

Finish sketch, start a new sketch on the top view, insert the corresponding image. Remanme the sketch "Top"

Finish sketch, start a new sketch on the right/left view, insert image

Go to the front view image and scale it. Sketch a line on the image, measure it and scale the image by dimensioning the image frame to the proper size. Usually takes a couple of itteration to get close enough. Then constrain the image to the origin using dims that put a feature at the origin.

Go to the top view, use the same image frame dim as the front to scale the top image. Constrain it to the origin so that the feature in the front view is in line with the same feature in the top view.

Do the same for the side view.

Start a new sketch and start tracing. Don't trace on the image views, it will only confuse the issue when editing them later. You can turn the appropriate sketch on or off as needed.

[mcgyvr]

I thought there was some program on the Autodesk labs site that allows you to make 3d models from a few pictures at different angles..

http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/photo_scene_editor/

[JDMather]

See this tutorial.

http://home.pct.edu/~jmather/content/DSG322/Inventor%20Tutorials/Inventor%202011%20Tutorial%2014.pdf

[steambc]

Awesome, rdyson. I think that's gonna work great. I should have been able to figure that out but I was in "information overload" mode.

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@rdyson wrote:

What I do:

Start a new sketch on the front view, insert the image corresponding to the front (Sketch>Insert>Image.) Rename the sketch "Front"

Finish sketch, start a new sketch on the top view, insert the corresponding image. Remanme the sketch "Top"

Finish sketch, start a new sketch on the right/left view, insert image

Go to the front view image and scale it. Sketch a line on the image, measure it and scale the image by dimensioning the image frame to the proper size. Usually takes a couple of itteration to get close enough. Then constrain the image to the origin using dims that put a feature at the origin.

Go to the top view, use the same image frame dim as the front to scale the top image. Constrain it to the origin so that the feature in the front view is in line with the same feature in the top view.

Do the same for the side view.

Start a new sketch and start tracing. Don't trace on the image views, it will only confuse the issue when editing them later. You can turn the appropriate sketch on or off as needed.

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[steambc]

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@mcgyvr wrote:

I thought there was some program on the Autodesk labs site that allows you to make 3d models from a few pictures at different angles..

http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/photo_scene_editor/

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Thanks. I'll take a look at that.