We are going to insert the drawing from the Vectored Image in my previous blog, How to Vector an Image, into an Autodesk Inventor model. I would suggest, if you haven’t already, to use AutoCAD or similar, to first clean up your drawing of unnecessary items, simplify it and check that all enclosed areas are completely closed before hand, This will make your life a lot easier later on.

Firstly, Open or Create a model part you want to use.

Select Sketch off the Sketch Panel,

then the Surface or Plane you are going to use.

Select the ACAD on the Insert Panel.

Browse your computer and find the drawing you want to insert.

Then Click Open.

The Import Options menu pops up, if there were multiple layers in the imported drawing, you can select which of the layers you want to bring across,

Click Next to view more options.

Sometimes you may need to tweak the drawing that is to be imported a bit first,

normally it is just to making sure that the units in the imported drawing,

match the Inventor model,

or else you may get a much larger or smaller imported sketch than anticipated.

Don’t worry too much about it, unless you are very concerned with accuracy.

There is a fix later on, where we will scale the sketch down.

Your sketch should now be Imported,

Notice my sketch is very large in comparison to my model?

This is why it is best to try and clean up the sketch before importing it,

so you have the correct scale straight away.

You can scale it down though this can be inaccurate.

For what we are doing, this shouldn’t be an issue.

Next we select Scale under the Modify Panel.

Then, select everything in the sketch we wish to scale.

Select the Base Point, I roughly picked the centre of the sketch.

Select the Scale factor,

this will depend on the size of your sketch in relation to your model,

I used 0.1 to scale down the sketch to 10% of the original size it was imported as.

When the size is close to what you require (it can be fine-tuned a bit later on),

Click Apply or Done, to close the menu.

Next we move the Sketch roughly to or desired location.

Select Move under the Modify Panel.

Like with Scale, we Select the objects in the sketch to move,

Give it a base point, I used roughly the middle again,

Then Click in roughly the centre on the surface that you want to move the objects sketch onto.

You may want to clean up the objects in the sketch,

like doing some fine tweaking to the scale and positioning of the objects.

I just removed the border lines around the text.

Click Finish Sketch.

Now we add some Depth,

Select Extrude on the Create Panel.

For the Profile (This should be automatically selected)

Select the Internal or External Areas of the enclosed objects.

This can be tricky but just be patient,

the cleaner/simpler you managed to get the vectorization of the starting image,

will make this a lot easier to do.

If you cant select the areas, you may need to try clean/simplify the sketch a bit more.

Give the Extrude a Distance,

my model was quite small so I used 1 mm.

Click OK when you are happy with the result.

If all the Objects you selected where properly enclosed, it should extrude.

This can take a while to compute depending on complexity.

Then your end result should display.

Then you can play around and do some interesting things.