1 Topic by Smitty505000

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Topic: Best way to create a crow or raven in Pro-e wildfire 4?

Hey all,

  I use Pro-e wildfire 4 and have been designing an animatronic crow/raven for halloween. Making all the innards for mechanics is the easy part smile I am looking for suggestions on how to make the outer shell. I have a scale size solid foam crow (used to be covered in feathers) that could be scanned or photos taken and turned into a model. My question is, can it then somehow be imported into pro-e and modified or added to??

Thanks,
Smitty

2 Reply by Skyblue (edited by Skyblue 2013-03-31 15:35:25)

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Re: Best way to create a crow or raven in Pro-e wildfire 4?

Hello, you might want to try Catch123d.  Watch some videos on YouTube, or just go to their site.  Free software, learning curve, but works pretty well.  The initial file created can be exported as .obj.  Then, using Netfab, or whatever, can be loaded and exported as an STL as well as other various formats.

3 Reply by Smitty505000

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Re: Best way to create a crow or raven in Pro-e wildfire 4?

I have dounloaded 123D catch and meshmixer and have started playing with them. One question I have is, once I import a .stl or .obj file into pro-e wildfire, how can I modify it? It is a "dumb" part and I cant do much with it.

Smitty

4 Reply by Smitty505000

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Re: Best way to create a crow or raven in Pro-e wildfire 4?

After some thought (always helpful) I am going to model it completely in PRO-E. I am going to slice the foam model down the middle and cut it into sections that can be traced onto graph paper, measured, and redrawn in PRO. Then do a swept blend to connect the sections. smile

Smitty

5 Reply by IanJohnson

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Re: Best way to create a crow or raven in Pro-e wildfire 4?

If you already scanned the raven, you might be able to do the same thing by making slices of the model and taking screenshots.  Netfabb Studio Basic can make cuts using a plane.

6 Reply by markulus

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Re: Best way to create a crow or raven in Pro-e wildfire 4?

If you have access to the "Style" feature (depends on your license of Pro/E), it has a tool built in called "Trace Sketch" that has some baked-in functionality for importing, orienting and scaling your scanned sketches (JPGs) properly.

I used Pro/E a lot in a past life, but from what I remember the style feature would be pretty useful in your case. I've done the measure and model approach, and I found drawing over trace sketches to be a much easier workflow.

The style feature is an interesting creature in Pro/E but you can use it to create geometry that would be very challenging & time consuming to produce otherwise using compound / intersected curves.

Some searches for "Style feature trace sketch", or "ISDX trace sketch" yield some useful results in the PTC fora. ISDX was the name of the Pro/E module that eventually got rebranded as the style feature.

7 Reply by mm2tts

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Re: Best way to create a crow or raven in Pro-e wildfire 4?

You are going to be facing some serious challenges trying to do a character with nurbs modeling. It's just not cut out for capturing the kinds of detail natural forms have. Much better to use a Sub-D modeler, though that learning curve can be steep. I here that Creo (newer Pro-E) has a sub-d like module in it; but I assume you are not currently under Pro-E support, or you wouldn't be using WildFire 4.