Designing assemblies in a 2D program like Illustrator can be a difficult task, especially when the design involves many parts that fit together in a complex way. Below is outlined a procedure for verifying illustrator designs by putting together the components in Maya, a 3D application.
The design file I'm verifying in this example is for a small fume hood for spray painting and has a total of 11 parts, 2 duplicates, as shown below.
To bring a part into Maya first make a new illustrator file and copy and paste the part into it. 'Expand Appearance' of parts to remove any pathfinder or rounding history nodes and save as an Illustrator 8 file. Then in Maya create an Illustrator Object of the file and set the thickness to extrude the curves.
ILLUSTRATOR
- Object > Expand Apperance
- Save As - Illustrator 8
MAYA
- Create > Adobe Illustrator Object > [Box] (options)
- Remove both start and end bevels
- Set the extrude distance to the thickness of the material in cm.
Here I am positioning the top to the side by aligning the groves at the edge of each panel.
The finished fume box with the front door removed.
A problem area with the file, here one of the panels can be seen to overlap with the side panel. This I'll go back in Illustrator and fix based on measurements taken in Maya.
