Communicating Your Design - Autodesk Inventor 2010: No Experience Required - page 477

Rendering with a Surface Style
Some of the color selections that come with Inventor are already associated with
surface styles that have a bump map enabled. In this exercise, you'll do a render-
ing with a bump map applied to see the difference.
The color that I chose for my pulley was Copper (Old/Polished), which has a
smooth surface. Let's change that and see what the effect is:
1. Open the Surface Styles tool from the Scene panel.
The Surface Styles dialog appears, with the part's color preselected
and showing the properties inherent with it.
The tabs of the Surface Styles dialog allow you to radically change
the appearance of a component in the rendering from the way it appears
in the model or assembly. One simple change should make an impres-
sion about just how powerful this style is.
2. Switch to the Bump Map tab.
3. Pick the check box next to Use Bump Image. This launches a dialog
in which you can open an image fi le to use as a bump map.
A bump map is just an image fi le. The program analyzes the con-
trast between portions of the image and uses that to replicate varia-
tions in the surface of the component when it's rendering.
4. Pick the fi rst image, AlloySand2_bump.bmp , as the bump map, and
click OK to load it into the surface style. See Figure 9.43.
5. Set the Scale slide bar to approximately 50 (%), or type the value 50
in the window to the right of the slide bar.
The preview image at lower left updates with the change in scale.
6. Click Save and then Done to fi nish editing the surface style.
Notice that the model's appearance in the Design window doesn't
change. Applying a bump map only affects the rendered output.
7. Start the Render Image tool, and use the last settings to create the
image shown in Figure 9.44.
8. Close the Render Output window and the Render Image dialog.
9. Save the fi le.
Creating a high-quality still rendering can make it much easier to explain an
idea to someone who doesn't have experience in design and engineering. When
delivering dimensional information isn't necessary, a rendering can tell the
story effectively.