Camo patterns for Inventor

[Chris Figgatt]

Hello all! I'm fairly new to the forum (I have been a member for a while and enjoy reading the posts!) and need a little help answering a question that I have about Autodesk Inventor 2008. I do quite a bit of design work for a couple of companies that manufacture archery sights and we completely model the entire sight before any production begins.

The companies that I do work for coat their sights with various camo patterns such as: Realtree Hardwoods, Mossy Oak Breakup, Mathews Lost Camo etc. I was wondering if anyone out there has a color styles download in any or some of these patterns for Autodesk Inventor. I'm aware that you can edit colors with the styles editor but I was wondering if anyone had downloads for actual camo patterns.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Chris

[MarkWink]

Chris,

If those cammo patterns are available as a bitmaps from the web, save them as bmp files and add them into your inventor 2008/texture/surfaces directory.

You might have to play with the scaling them correctly

Mark

[Chris Figgatt]

Thanks Mark,

I was able to cut some of these patterns from the web, save them as bitmap files and then add them as several different decals to the various surfaces of the parts we were designing. It served the purpose but wasn't really how I would have liked to do it.

I'll try your suggestion. I haven't tried adding different surfaces / textures to Inventor before. I'll let you know how it goes!

Chris

[Chris Figgatt]

Mark, your idea worked great, that's exactly what I was looking for. I had no idea of this capability. I'm sure that this will greatly enhance my designs in the future.

Thanks,
Chris

[MarkWink]

Chris,

Glad to help.

Having the rendering as close to the production part certainly adds the "Wow!" factor.

I showed that to my brother-in-law who does custom furniture/cabinets,
so he can swap the species of wood and stain colors right in front of the customer to help them make those decisions.

Mark

[Chris Figgatt]

It sure does! From a machining or engineering standpoint it adds absolutely no benefit what so ever, but it sure does make the parts look more impressive. My client is a manufacturer of archery sights and for the first time we designed a new sight totally in Inventor. Before reading your post, I was able to apply the .bmp images as "decals" to his parts.......he was totally blown away as were his machinists in the shop.

Prior to this he had always given his machinists a general idea, they would cut a part and then he would refine the design. As you can imagine, this process went back and forth quite a number of times before they came up with a finished product.

After we finished, he was able to see a finished product in its entirety before the first chip was made, all in just a little over a week! The addition of a camo pattern, stickers, etc. just added the icing on the cake!

Again, thanks for the help!
Chris