Making your Inventor models look good without going into Inventor Studio is made easy through the use of appearances. To access the tools you need select the View ribbon. On the appearance tab you have a few options to make your models look really while viewing and designing.
To start playing around with the visual effects the first tool we can use is Shadows. As you can see below there is a dramatic difference with just switching shadows on and off. There are 3 shadows you can play around with. Ground shadows, Ambient Shadows and Object Shadows. The Ground Shadow casts the model’s shadow onto the ground plane which does not have to be visible to see the shadow. The Object Shadow casts the shadows of the features you have modeled onto itself. Ambient Shadows cast shadows in corners giving a nice transition between features.
The next setting we have to put on is the Ground Plane. It shows a work plane at the base of the model. You can change the color of the plane as well as the transparency.
Switching on the Reflection setting will reflect an image of the object on the Ground Plane.
The final step to give a really good appearance would be to change the view to a perspective view from orthographic.
The final setting would be to do a ray trace of the view. First select the Realistic setting from your Visual Style. The Ray Tracing button will now become active. Selecting Ray Tracing will start to ray trace the model.
You have 3 setting for Ray Trace. Low, Draft and High. Low and Draft will give a quick approximation of materials and lighting and High will give you a final rendering worth showing to your clients.
