It looks like a sectioned pyramid and is the last command in the panel menu below.

In the sketch environment there’s one new button that’s added. (The “Smooth Shading” option is only available if that information existed in the OBJ file. There are also several options to control how it is displayed that are accessed from the context menu, as shown below. When you read in the OBJ or STL data a new icon is created in the browser to represent the data. If using the ribbon interface it is in the Add-Ins panel of the Part ribbon. Its icon is the yellow pyramid as shown below (the second to the last command in the panel bar). The first is added to the part environment. The add-in adds two commands to Inventor. To be able to make use of the mesh data for modeling the add-in supports a command that lets you cut a section through the client graphics, which creates a sketch that can then be cleaned up and used as input for standard Inventor features. What you see is just client graphics which means it’s only for display and doesn’t affect the model and can’t be used for other operations like interference checking, measure, etc.

It allows you to read in an OBJ or STL file and see it in Inventor. It’s an add-in that uses client graphics and client features, plus a lot of code of my own. The Facet Enabler add-in became the result. (OBJ and STL files are formats that define a model using a mesh of triangles.) It was difficult for them to use this data in Inventor and it seemed to me like something could be done to improve the process and it became a pet project of mine. In one of their classes the students need to create an Inventor model to fit around a model that’s defined by an OBJ file. The program came about after I visited a university a couple of years ago that is using Inventor as part of their engineering program. A big reason I’m posting it here is that I continue to get requests for the program and this will provide a better way to distribute and update it than the newsgroup. This posting isn’t about how to use the API but is an example of what can be done with the API and hopefully is useful to some of you.

Mesh enabler inventor 2020