Autodesk Inventor - Pix On ABPW

[Tom Watson]

I've been messing around with this program for about a week.

It's pretty interesting.

What I've done so far has been work related but I'm hoping to use it to draw a tall chest that I want to build.

It is expensive, if purchased for commercial use, but there are student/teacher licenses available that bring it down to the $150.00 range.

I'd like to figure out how to scan in actual materials to use for the surfaces, instead of the somewhat limited library of colors and textures.

Thomas J. Watson - WoodDorker

tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet (real email)

(webpage)

[Krunchy]

not much to figure there... textures and libraries are on the second cd...(its a 2 cd set)

[Tom Watson]

Those libraries are installed.

My question goes to the possibility of scanning in material to use as custom surfacing.

The difficulty with doing this, in other programs that I have used, is that the scale and color are not maintained by the program.

Scanning in a piece of actual cherry does not give you a scaled version of the surface, which makes it useless for the replication of grain and pattern.

There is also usually a color shift, which can sometimes be modified, but never seems to amount to a true replication of the scanned material.

"Is a puzzlement."

(cf: Rogers and Hammerstein, The King and I, Yul Brynner, etc., etc., etc....)

Thomas J. Watson - WoodDorker

tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet (real email)

(webpage)

[igor]

Tom -- If you have not already tried this, have you checked the Autodesk user forums? Or maybe at their website there are free downloads of stuff that users have offered up for free? -- Igor

[Tom Watson]

Yes, I've been on the forums and gone to places like the Thomas Register site and the private sites that key in on Inventor.

There is some useful stuff there but not exactly what I'm looking for.

The program and its users seems geared towards mechanical work, rather than furniture, either retail fixtures or traditional wooden work.

Thomas J. Watson - WoodDorker

tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet (real email)

(webpage)

[Chris Johnson]

I believe what you are looking for is something like 3ds Max or Autodesk VIZ (well, at least in the Autodesk line-up as I'm sure there are many others). These packages can render photoreal scenes light-years ahead of what Inventor can. Your observation in another post is correct; Inventor is for mechanical design.

In case you haven't found it yet, you can control the color of a texture and you can make your own custom textures for Inventor. You would need a rather large scanner or stitch a bunch of normal scans together to get the scale right on a large piece. The images are .bmp so place that order for more RAM soon. :)

Chris Johnson