Transparent Maps in Inventor?

[Kevin Thorp]

On our robot we have clear Lexan panels with a bunch of decals, and some of them have irregular shapes. It would be very time consuming to create thin parts for all the decals.

I'm familiar with Autodesk 3ds Max and would not have trouble creating a texture map with all the decals on a transparent background.

Can this also be done in Inventor, or Inventor Studio?

[JD Mather]

Expand the sketch that has the image.
Edit the Sketch.
Right click on the image icon in the browser and select Properties.
Select Transparency.
Whatever pixel is in the lower right hand corner will be your transparent mask color.
Use bmp for best results or second choice png. Do not use jpg as it will change the mask pixels and not give good transparency.

Use Decal command in Inventor to apply to part face(s).

Of course you may need to edit the source bitmap in a bitmap editing software like MS Paint or better.

If you have trouble figuring it out attach the bitmap image here.

[Kevin Thorp]

Thanks JD. That worked great on solid materials (we could see the underlying material where the transparancy was) but not so good on polycarbonate (clear) material. The solid parts of bitmap become semi-transparent.

[JD Mather]

Originally Posted by Kevin342

Thanks JD. That worked great on solid materials (we could see the underlying material where the transparancy was) but not so good on polycarbonate (clear) material. The solid parts of bitmap become semi-transparent.

Think of it like a real world physical decal or painted on emblem.
The decal has thickness and is in fact a part so model as a part and attach the part to the polycarbonate part.
Paint has thickness so think of dried paint as a solid part and model as a solid part and then "glue" in assembly as a "paint part" to the polycarbonate part.

That is what I had to do to "paint" the white on this semi-transparent assembly.

Attach the image file here if you need help.

[Kevin Thorp]

I'm sorry - I'm still not getting it.

Did you had create a model of the decal with the same shape as bitmap, then apply the bitmap "decal" to it, then attach it to the stapler assembly?

Or did you just apply the bitmap to the blue stapler part?

We tried the latter, but the decal ended up semi-transparent (even the parts we wanted to be opaque).

[JD Mather]

Created a part same shape as decal to apply the decal. Then used that part placed on the transparent part.

The easy way was to Split the Faces and Thicken Offfset as surface, the Derive Component the surface to create the Decal part. Guess there was bit of work involved that might be beyond beginner level.

If you can attach your image I might be able to give more advice.

[Kevin Thorp]

I appreciate the help, but I think we'll just live with partially transparent decals. We're out of time and I'm pretty sure our Inventor team has uploaded their entry (or hopefully will today).

I'm more familiar with Autodesk 3ds Max, which does allow decals with transparancies to be applied to transparent objects. I was hoping Inventor had the same thing, but it's not a big deal. The rest of the robot looks great

[Molten]

Something to think about for next: Maybe you could make the decals transparent in the real world so they match? It's kind of the easy fix, but might hurt you on aesthetics.