@watkins said:
Dear Chris,
Thanks for the explanation. I too came from the drawing board world, and then AutoCAD, but for some reason it took me ages to get used to 3D modelling (something about how my brain works). Even now I only use a fraction of Inventor's capabilities. For me Sketchup has replaced both the drawing board and 2D layouts in AutoCAD. I now go straight to Sketchup. I have been pleased to find that I can export from Inventor (as a .sat file) and then import into Sketchup via AutoCAD (after scaling up by x 100 inside AutoCAD). As yet I have not found a way to import Sketchup files into Inventor.
Did you see my thread textures post? You might find the textures useful (they are in the Materials and Styles section). I have attached part of an assembly I'm working on as an example of how I use Sketchup.
I've been doing solid modeling since the mid 90's and my experience is generally the more capable a designer is with AutoCAD the longer it takes to really embrace the power of designing in 3D. In the past it was always the 'young bucks' who came quickly up to speed while the grizzled veterans often times really struggled to get their heads around it.
That's a very impressive model. The discipline you learned in Inventor shows in the model. I'm amazed at how haphazardly some models are assembled. Have you created a fastener library? What I see as a major drawback of SketchUp is the lack of technical quality hardware models. Saying that though, we certainly created a lot of our own in the early days of Pro-E and SolidWorks.
Have a look at the stl exporter from Didier Bur in the Ruby section. I use it to export models into SolidWorks, but I don't know if Inventor supports stl file import or not. SolidWorks certainly doesn't do it very elegantly.
chris
