Communicating Your Design - Autodesk Inventor 2010: No Experience Required - page 430

3D Is Just the Beginning
In Chapter 4, “Working with Solid Models and Weldments,” you created a draw-
ing of the bearing support assembly and a second drawing sheet of the plate. The
tools you learned there will allow you to detail most of the components that many
designers and engineers work with.
In this chapter, you'll work with a number of tools that, like traditional 2D
drawings, are made to help you communicate your design with others. What is
new in this age of creating digital prototypes is who you may need to communi-
cate with and who may want to use your design data as the basis for a different
form of communication.
You'll begin by addressing more traditional needs: creating descriptive draw-
ing views that will be useful for manufacturing. Then, you'll repurpose some of
that material to create communication materials that can be sent to a vendor or
customer. Finally, you'll use your data to sell itself by creating images that can
be used to promote your new product before you've built it.
Advanced Drawing Views
I hope you were impressed by Inventor's drafting capabilities in Chapter 4. Now,
you'll add more artistic tools to your repertoire that will let you create drawing
views you probably haven't used since you were on the drafting board.
Sketch-Derived Views
The advanced drawing views you'll be working with use sketching elements or
require you to create sketches in order to defi ne the construction of the views.
Inventor allows you to add sketch elements to the drawing view for the sake of
augmenting the view. All the sketching tools are the same as those used to
defi ne 3D models, so everything should be familiar.
Note that you can easily end up with unintended and undesirable results if
you accidentally create sketch elements that aren't associated with the drawing
view. It's important to make sure that the view you want to work with is high-
lighted before you start a sketch.
The fi rst tool we'll discuss is the break-out view. The break-out view needs an
existing drawing view to modify. Let's create a drawing to work with.