Throughout my time as a drafter, I have been fortunate enough to work on several very unique projects, however one project in particular stands out as my favorite project that I’ve been a part of. Typically as a drafter, I was tasked with drawing up plans for exterior building facing and paving, and ensuring that all the pieces are properly anchored. While I thoroughly enjoyed the technical aspect of this, it left little room for any kind of creativity. However, I was part of a project of for an exterior garden out on the east coast that called for a few animal sculptures to be made out of stone, which was a refreshing departure from the normally rectangular pieces I was used to drawing up.
Animal Sculptures
For this project, we had received some partially complete 3D models from out client, but we needed to finish them out and bring them to life. The model files we received we far from usable, with some areas that were missing that needed to be filled in. I was able to complete out the models in Inventor, and we were able to to use 3D models directly on our milling machines to create these pieces out of a single piece of stone each. The final products kept the polygonal shapes of the exact 3D models we had drawn up in AutoCAD and Inventor, just as the customer had requested.
While the Lion was definitely my favorite out of the four animals we created, there was also a tortoise, bear, and elephant that were created.