Electric Bicycle With Batteries in the Frame

This is an ongoing project I have been working on using Autodesk Inventor. The ultimate goal is to develop a design that will allow the batteries, which will power the electric, to be placed within the frame of the bicycle. The picture shown below is a rendering of the bicycle as it is now in a court yard in Dublin, Ireland. That really me there, but the bicycle is not really there (clarification probably not needed). This instructable will not outline how to model in Inventor, but will show how to render a nice image once you have a model. I will also show the bicycle at various stages of the modeling process and the battery holders which will allow the batteries to be wired together as they are placed in the frame of the bike.

This was a drawing I sketched up in AutoDesk SketchBook Designer 2011. The reason I did this was to provide an image to refer to. This helped mainly in keeping me motivated and to remind me that the point of all of this was to develop a design which would allow a bicycle to be electric while still looking like a bicycle.

This is the battery holder. It is designed in order to accommodate one a123 ANR26650 Lithium Ion Cylindrical Cell. Notice the electrical pins which will slide together as they are inserted in the frame of bicycle.

This is the part that would be ideal for printing. The electrical pins and wire would be added after printing.

This is simply a shot of one day of progress I took for record keeping.

So once you have your 3D model it is nice to see it in a real world setting. It can also be a necessity for marketing purposes. Open your assembly file and go to the environments tab then inventor studio on the ribbon. You are now in the Inventor Studio. For rendering a image the best place to start is to find a nice image that you would like to use. 

You want to go to your scene styles and insure that ground plane is aligned correctly. Notice the yellow plane lined up with the base of the tires on the bike.
This is completed in the environment tab.

Then choose image as your background type and find your image. (you may need to save it in the Users\Public\Documents\Autodesk\Inventor 2011\Backgrounds\ folder)

 I set my position to stretch in order to get the full image in the rendered result.

Save your scene style.

At this point i like to run a number of low quality renderings in order to help me find the correct orientation I want the model as well as how intense I want the shadow or reflection (depending on the setting). The shadow and reflection setting can be found in the  scene styles dialog box under the environment tab.

So to render the images go to Render Image On the Ribbon. This opens the Render Image dialog box. I use the current view camera setting and adjust the current view after each rendering until I am happy with the positioning. The lighting style for this example was set to outdoor. It will be edited later. The scene style will be the style we created in the previous step. I chose Shaded for the Render Type.

Go to the Output tab and choose a low Antialiasing option and render it. Adjust and re-render.

Now that you have the position the way you like it you will also know which way the shadow fall and consequently where the light should come from. For this example the Outdoor default lighting style was adjusted to fit my needs. Go to Lighting Styles on the ribbon and choose your lighting style. I turned off one of the light sources (to remove the double shadow effect). Then changed the Sky light to a Directional type source of light. Once this is done you will be able to adjust the position of the light to fit your needs.