Inlay Wizard June 2007

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The inlay wizard from VX Corp. produces inlaid shapes and raised bosses such as company logos or text on product surfaces. The VX CAD/CAM is said to offer true hybrid modeling functionality, enabling customers to define highly complex product shapes with curvatures intended to lend good ergonomics and appearance.

The unit addresses a common challenge for designers: the need to apply a shape such as text or a logo as either a slightly raised boss or an inlay. It is necessary to produce the inlay geometry accurately in CAD models for the purposes of manufacturing and is especially important for mold designers for producing injection-molded parts. Even flat surfaces require careful design for manufacturability. The same task on a multicurvature surface is even more time-consuming using traditional modeling tools.

The Wizard solution is said to make a once-tedious task easy. Working in tandem with a “wrap” command, which can actually wrap a planar sketch onto any face curvature, the application can accept any shape or 3-D text to produce a subtle inlay or slightly raised boss in seconds, complete with user-specified draft relief and blend filleting, as one parametric feature. The parameters of the feature can be edited via the history tree at any time. www.vx.com