BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor

In the last post in this series, I left off with a very basic reverse engineered part….which in many cases would be all that is required. In this post I will further refine the model to look less blocky.

I’ll try to add some polish to the model by performing one more cut using the front profile, cleaning up the artifacts on the top, adding the fillets, creating the pipes on the sides, rounding this and removing that, and adding the hardware…..some of which will likely spill into the next post.

The Front Cut.

In order to perform this cut procedure, I placed another instance of the Front block on a plane I created at the very frontmost extent of the model. To create the plane, I selected the edge shown in the image below (cyan line), then the YZ plane in the Origin folder. In the dialog that popped up, I changed the default 90° Angle setting to 0°, then clicked the green check mark to accept the value…

I started a new sketch on this new plane, and added an instance of the Front block to it by dragging the block from the Blocks folder onto the sketch. I added a Coincident Constraint between the insertion point and the Center Point of the sketch, and a Horizontal Constraint to the top horizontal line to fully constrain the block. If you look at the side elevation along with the new front elevation, below, the profiles marked A (colored green for illustration sake) need to cut the model back to the angled line shown at B. To do so, I needed to create a plane on that line.

Steps needed to create the cut

The creation of the plane at the line shown at B was the same as the last one, but used the XZ origin plane and the angle was left at 90°.

With this stopping plane in place, I fired up the Extrude tool and selected the profiles highlighted earlier, set the Extents to To, the operation to Cut, and clicked OK…