What is Inventor?
Inventor is a computer software that gives you the ability to create 3D objects. It is mostly used to have a visual look of an object before creating it. We can also use it to create something that will be 3D printed.
Creating a 3D widget.
The first step in creating a 3D object on Inventor, is to draw a sketch with the approximate shape of one of the widget's sides.
After that, we must enter the correct dimension of the widget's side. In this case, the sides are measured in inches. We than click on "finish sketch".
The next step is to "extrude" our sketch. That means we are going to make it 3D by giving it the depth wanted. For this widget, it's 1 inch.
The final step is to cut all the holes and sometimes add mass. Here, we are going to cut off a corner. To do so, we must create a sketch of what we want to cut off and dimension it. We click on "finish sketch".
We our going to extrude the sketch we made to make it disappear. It must be extruded by the correct width, here it's 0.25 inches.
This is what the finished widget looks like! Hope you enjoyed.
Other widgets created:
What did I learn?
During this introduction to Inventor I learned a lot to about the software and how to use it. Inventor was pretty intuitive and kind of easy to use, even if some things were hard to understand sometimes... I finished the six widgets pretty fast and without many trouble. Overall I really enjoyed using this software.