topic Re: Surface dent/deformation in Inventor Forum

Surface dent/deformation

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 08:35:01 GMT

Hello, good people 🙂

I am looking for a way of creating a "dent" on a flat surface. For example like on an attached pic

Re: Surface dent/deformation

sam_m — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 10:44:36 GMT

you want to loft from the undended face to the dented position.

I think this would be best with surfaces:

1 - create the undented face (as a surface)

2 - offset this to the max depth of the dent

3 - create a sketch and draw the "start" and "end" of the dent - the edges where you want the dent to start to deform away from the original face and also the patch of the "fully dended" area

4 - use split face to remove the unwanted areas (inside the original face and outside the fully dented patch)

5 - use loft to go from the inside edges of the starting face to the outside edges of the dented patch - choose tangential conditions for both

6 - stitch all the surfaces together and then thicken the quilt to give you a solid.

alternative method #1: instead of having a dented patch/shape you can loft to a point (and have that tangential), depending on whether you want to control the shape of the dented patch.

alternative method #2: with 2015 (and I guess into the future), I guess you could probably use the direct/freeform modelling features. I've not got 2015 installed atm so I couldn't comment further.

I hope that makes sense - 2014 file attached.

Re: Surface dent/deformation

JDMather — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 10:46:44 GMT

What version of Inventor are you using?

If 2015 - simply use the Form tool.

Re: Surface dent/deformation

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 13:15:41 GMT

2014 🙂

Re: Surface dent/deformation

Anonymous — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 07:30:15 GMT

Thank you for the help, it worked. I've been struggling with this though, and the result lacked quality (my bad). So for people like me (begginers) I highly recommend to install 2015 version with the free form feature 🙂