Creating Contoured and Plastic Parts - Autodesk Inventor 2010: No Experience Required - page 407

You may have noticed that when you create work planes or have them visible,
they appear to be one color from one point of view but change color when you
see the other side of the plane.
You're not imagining things — that's really happening. Planes have a positive
face and a negative face. For 2D sketches, it really doesn't matter which direc-
tion the plane's normal or positive direction is facing. For other elements, such
as text, or when you're placing an image on a plane, it can have an effect.
On my screen, when I look at the front of the fan blade, the new plane appears
blue. This means that in my color scheme, I'm looking at the back of the plane.
You're about to create a sketch with an image in it, and having the plane face
away from you will likely cause the image to be backward.
Let's fi x this ahead of time:
14. Move your cursor near the new work plane. When it highlights;
right-click, and select Flip Normal from the context menu.
15. Create a sketch on the work plane.
Now you need to do a little work outside of Inventor.
16. In Windows Explorer, create a folder named C:\Data\Images .
17. Copy an image ( .bmp , .jpg , .png , .tif , .gif , and so on) of your
choice into this folder.
18. Return to Inventor, and select the Insert Image tool from the Insert
panel of the Sketch tab. This brings up the Open dialog.
19. Navigate to the Images folder, and select the image fi le of your choice.
20. Click Open to place the image in your sketch.
Depending on the size of your image, your preview will vary, but a
boundary around the image will frame it. This lets you locate and
size the image on the model — for example, if you have a scan of a
safety sticker that is 3 inches wide, you can dimension the frame and
it will scale to be 3 inches wide. This gives you a whole new way to
deal with nomenclature on your designs.
21. Use the Horizontal and Vertical sketch constraints to center your
image on the sketch centerpoint.
22. Apply a dimension to make the largest portion of your image 2.5
inches wide or tall.
23. Turn off the visibility of the work plane. See Figure 8.52.
24. Finish the sketch, and save the model.