Tips and tricks: Sculpt
Published Tue 20 May 2008
The sculpt tool in Inventor is a very powerful and useful command. Experience Manufacturing takes a closer look at exactly what it can do for you.
The sculpt tool was introduced within the Inventor R11 release, so it has been around for around two years now. It is a really useful piece of functionality that is great for generating shapes which might normally be quite difficult or time consuming to model.
Sculpt is really useful when there is a need to generate geometry which, years gone by, may have originally required the use of face deletion, surface trimming, splitting and stitching to get to the finished shape. With Sculpt, by selecting surfaces, solid body faces or work planes a 3D fill can be generated where material will be either removed or added.
This tutorial will concentrate on one use of Sculpt (there are many more), in this case where there is a requirement to generate a sweep that effectively terminates on a particular face such as a teapot handle or spout.
1 If we take a look at how the completed model may have been generated, we can see that the teapot body would have been generated firstly by a revolution and then shelled.
To allow us to easily generate the solid handle we could try to make sure the sketch profiles terminate within the wall thickness of the body BUT if the wall thickness isn’t thick enough the sweep may end up with geometry protruding into the inside.
2 To generate the finished solid model we can make use of the Sculpt command, but before we get that far instead of the sweep being generated as a solid it should really be created as a surface.
To do this couldn’t be simpler, once the sketch profiles for the side and cross section have been created just select the surface option rather than the solid. In this particular example we will also take advantage of the additional sweep options available to us.
By defining the sweep as a surface and selecting the Path & Guide Rail type of sweep it also means we don’t have to use Loft.
3 Now the Sculpt tool can now be used to complete the handle and generate a solid feature rather than a surface that also terminates against the outside teapot wall.
After picking the Sculpt command just select the newly generated surface that represents the handle and you should now easily see where the solid will be generated.
Depending on the actual geometry being modelled you may have to toggle the selected surface normal as this controls the direction in which the geometry will be created.
4 There you have it. The sweep operation and sculpt have been used to generate a handle that terminates exactly against the outer face.
To complete the teapot a similar operation would be used on the spout but this time taking advantage of lofted surfaces rather than swept.
As mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial Sculpt is a very powerful and useful command, it can make aesthetic shapes easier to define and more robust to edit. It conjunction with other commands such as ‘Copy Object’ it can even change the way you do things such as replacing the derive and subtract workflow for mould tool design, etc.
Take a look and the Tips and Tricks on the Autodesk website where there is another example of how Sculpt can be used.To view these and other tutorials / skill builders go to www.autodesk.com/inventor-skillbuilder
