Take Flight with Free-Form Tools in Inventor 2015

IMAGINiT Tricks Tutorial: Traditional Autodesk Inventor modeling tools do not readily lend themselves to creating smooth organic shapes. Free-form modeling, however, allows these shapes to be created very quickly and easily.

We are going to start by sculpting the nose (a very difficult task with traditional Inventor tools). The process I’ve used is a central nodal stretch and translation to get the desired shape.






Changing the orientation and view makes the push/pull process quite a bit easier. Although for this test the modifications were made freehand, as you can see, Inventor’s dimensional edit dialog box is always present if exact movements are required. The editing tools are not restricted to move and stretch; scaling and rotation are available, as is the ability to modify the mesh density. The process can be very organic as you use the tools; this was a modeling method that was missing from Inventor for a very long time.

Continuing in this workflow, the following steps transform the cylinder to a very sophisticated shape which would have taken much longer — or may have been impossible to create — within Inventor in the past.

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