Drinking from a fire hose

[Anonymous]

Howdy,

About two years back I purchased a copy of Inventor through a club I had joined. My interest is purely as a hobbiest (no commercial interest whatsoever). I want to make castles and gaming terrain in 28 mm and war gaming machines of the sort you'd read about in a Jules Verne novel. Well to make a long strory short I was overwhelmed attemtpting to learn inventor and put it aside and haven't picked it up since. However I want to have another go at it. I was hoping that if I describe my goals then perhaps some of the folks here could tell me if Inventor was the right tool for my puropse and point me at some resources to get me up to speed on the skills I need to use it properly.

As far as the castle bits, I currently make things like this in plaster: http://www.hirstarts.com/gallery/gallery.html , http://www.hirstarts.com/gallery/gallery.html

Also I've never made ships before but I would dearly like to try to make something like this: http://space1889.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html

I have not yet purchased a 3D printer and won't until I can create the files to make what I want. So my question is: Is Inventor the right tool for these projects and what resources are available to get me up-to-speed on how to use it? Or would another tool be more appropriate for these purposes?

Regards,

Tim Manchester

[graemev]

Nice sculptures!

Inventor might not be the most appropriate tool for some of what you're doing.  Others will have a better idea of what other programs might be more appropriate.  (Z-brush?)  The detailed stone wall testuring will be challenging in Inventor, but the basic structure should be reasonably straight forward.  You may find a good workflow involves designing the body of the piece in Inventor, then exporting the 3-D files over to another program for textural detailing.

As far as the firehose metaphor...   How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.  Be prepared to invest significant time if you're truly interested in creating good sculptures.  You've done so in doing the work up to now, so keep at it when it comes to these new tools.

Start by doing the tutorials.  They will help you with the basic modelling concepts, where to find the tools you need, etc., etc.  Once you've started to find your way around the interface, start doing models of simple household objects.  What do I mean by simple?  Don't model the radio, model a knob from it.  Work your way up to more complicated objects and geometries.  Then start learning how to assemble various parts into assembly models.  At each stage, start simple and work towards the complex.  This is the same as how you learned sculpture, if I'm not mistaken.  Effort spent thinking about the basic shapes of objects and how one might most easily or efficiently geometrically describe them in the program - even while not at the computer - will pay off in efficiency when creating the part.  Work from the grosser shapes down towards the finer details.  Over time you will grow more comfortable with deciding when and where to add in specific features - deciding to fillet at the sketch level versus filleting the extruded solid, for example.

JD Mather's articles and tutorials (usually found in his posts' signatures here) are an excellent resource.  Others here also have links and tutorials available, so don't be afraid to ask.  (I'm sure some will be posting them to this thread shortly.)  If you find yourself getting stuck on a particular concept or technique, post a question here.  The natives are quite friendly and most helpful!

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! This is not an easy question to answer. I would say it largely depends on how you structure this design. For the castle, if you want to model the entire thing in a part, I would not say it is an easy task. It could take months not days to create realistic detail (the ship will take even longer). If you can break up the castle into common parts and try to reuse the common parts to build an assembly, it might take much shorter.

Thanks!

[The_Angry_Elf]

You could always take an Inventor class or two...hint hint.....;)

[Anonymous]

Your suggestions sound good. My first pass through I was able to do the basic structures but the textures were impossible for me (which was why I gave up). So then a two step process would work if I were to do the shapes in Inventor, export them and then add texture in another application. What apps are recommended for adding textures?

[Anonymous]

Definately in parts. The idea is to make war gaming terrain and it should be possible to open up larger structures to get inside them. One of the things that attracted me to inventor in the first place was that it seem to have the ability to take a larger design and split it up into parts that can be assembled. I would hope to be able to do that with most of my designs (eventually).

Regards,

Tim Manchester

[sam_m]

It sounds like either Inventor possibly isn't the right tool, or you will need at least 2 tools...

You have 2 problems:

1) design the shape and structure

2) creating realistic surface textures

Inventor will do the former but it's not really suitable for the latter.  You could use Mudbox (which was part of the Inventor Product Design Suite until this year - check if you have it) - I have to admit I've not used Mudbox, but I believe it's suitable (otherwise, there's ZBrush that's been mentioned already).

A tutorial for Mudbox here suggests it's possibly right up your street:

http://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/sculpting-a-modular-stone-staircase-in-autodesk-mudbox--cg-2024

I'm guessing it might be possible to create the structural shapes with it too, but I'm guessing it's not the best tool (like using Inventor for the surface detail).

Inventor will be great at creating the base-structure, whether it's a building/fort, a boat or whatever.  The way all the features are created using sketches and parametric dimensions should enable the tweaking of the shapes to make it suitable (I'm not sure how well an artistic tool like Mudbox would handle adjusting this).  It would also be easy to check all walls are connected and at least x mm thick (whatever is suitable for the desired 3d print technique).

Once you've got the shape of the object you can import into Mudbox to work on the exterior surface texture and then 3d print from that.

Helpfully...  Despite Mudbox being in the same package as Inventor, from a quick google it looks like it can't directly import Inventor files - wtf?!?  So, I think you need to follow the link below to add OBJ export ability to Inventor:

http://beinginventive.typepad.com/being-inventive/2011/06/export-inventor-part-file-as-obj-file.html

It also looks like Mudbox doesn't export to STL natively, but there's an addon tucked away in the installation to enable it - so, it sounds like it's not fully supported...   I wouldn't want to suggest importing back into Inventor after the surface texturing (to export for printing) as the number of polygons would be crazy and I don't think Inventor would like that...

The more I look at it, the more it makes be think ZBrush or even Blender might be a better solution to work with Inventor (it's all going to be down to file import from Inventor and then file export to the 3d printer).  Why, oh why, does Autodesk supply software in a package/suite that can't talk to each other out of the box?!?  it's crazy!

[graemev]

"What apps are recommended for adding textures?"

I honestly haven't got a clue - I've never done that particular kind of modelling.

Since you're intending to 3D print these models, I recommend also checking out Shapeways.com.  They have a very active community on their forums who will be of much assistance and guidance not just regarding the printing, but also the modelling and detailing of what you intend.  They have many experts on all sorts of modelling and design programs.  (You don't have to purchase any items, nor a membership, to become a member of that community.)

[dgorsman]

Commercial war gaming manufacturers will use the computer to do the overall design and shapes but not the fine detail, at least not from the beginning.  This is printed to a soft material which a sculptor will manually modify to get the fine detail.  From there, the parts may be passed into a fine detail laser scanner for computer tweaking to ensure the desired manufacturing process (extrusion mold, centrifugal process, etc.) will work properly, or used directly for mold creation.  The parts are printed with a much more durable material which may see further manual tweaks before a mold is created from it.

For your desired part level and quantity I'd suggest just getting the main features modeled up and then handling the finer details with manual sculpting using green or brown stuff.  As you gain more experience in using the software and the 3D printed results you can start adding more of those details.  Depending on the materials you have access to, using the 3D printed part to create a silicone mold may also be an option.

[dgorsman]

Probably not Blender.  If Inventor is drinking from the fire hose, Blender is drinking from the overflow channel on a dam.  The UI is... erm... "unique".  😄