Integration of sketch-based conceptual design and commercial CAD systems for manufacturing

Sketch-based modeling is a very important step towards a complete design process digitalization. For a complete digitalization, integration of sketch-based design modeling and commercial CAD systems is being a necessity. This is because of the need of detailed modification and refinement for the 3D models created by sketching. The integration can speed up the design process and affect competition between companies. In this paper, we present a new method to achieve the integration between sketch-based interfaces and commercial CAD systems by using gesture-based sketch modeling techniques for producing 3D conceptual design models and then translating the 3D models into CAD systems with feature recognition through IGES exchange files. Gesture-based modeling method was used because it works in a similar way to feature-based design approach and it is easy to extract features from its 3D models. IGES file format was used for exchanging 3D geometric model information because it is widely available within commercial CAD systems for data exchange and it also can express features and hierarchy information. 3D models were created with a gesture-based sketch interface for modeling and then information was extracted from it. After that, information was translated into IGES entities which were organized in a specific order in an IGES file. This information can be inputted into commercial CAD systems and recognized as a feature-based model with feature recognition embedded within CAD systems. To evaluate the proposed method, we conducted four case studies. In these case studies, we created 3D models and then transferred them into Autodesk Inventor as a commercial CAD system. After the CAD system recognized the 3D models successfully, we applied some modifications on the 3D models such as changing dimensions, positions and drafting to demonstrate the effective integration.