BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor

In the last installment, I re-scaled the image that represents the drawing of the part to be reverse engineered, and created a tracing of the part. Today I begin the modeling.

With the tracing of the side profile complete, there is just one more quick step to complete this profile —create a Sketch Block from it. To do so, I window selected the tracing as shown in the image to the right, and from the Layout panel of the Sketch tab, I choose the Create Block tool. That brought up the warning “Projected geometry is not supported by blocks. Select ‘OK’ to create the block without the projected geometry” as shown in the image below…

Projected Geometry Warning

…which I completely ignored. I clicked the ‘OK’ button to continue, which brought up the Create Block dialog box. Since the selection was already made, there was no need to use that tool, for the rest of the dialog, I entered the name “Side” in the ‘Block Name’ field, selected the center of the bottommost horizontal line as my “Insert Point”, and ticked the “Visibility” checkbox so I can see the insert point in the block.

With the settings set, I clicked ‘OK’ to accept them, and a sketch block was created.

The next step was to create the front elevation within the same sketch. To do so I first drew any horizontal lines that need to match the side elevation, then constrained them using Collinear constraints to their matching elements on the side elevation. The lines (right side) and their constraints (both sides) can be seen in the image below…

With those lines in place, the procedure to get the front elevation pretty much the same as the side elevation. I skipped any geometry I thought I wouldn’t need as it is easy enough to come back later and add it in if needed. Some of the lines required Parallel constraints to their counterparts on the side elevation, or measurements from same. In the end, this elevation went quite a bit faster as there were established parameters and norms to match. I took the sketch to the point shown below…