I have a few questions about how we can make rhino better for making patent drawings, if you have experience doing this type of work, please respond to this thread, or email me kyle@mcneel.com
Any half decent drafting service can make patent drawings fairly effectively in a variety of software. Is there a particular aspect you are looking to develop?
mainly the formatting, annotation style, etc… Basicaly I’d like to take this: http://wiki.mcneel.com/_media/rhino/patent_drawing.zip
and make it more full featured so less user formatting is required.
but, I have not done any of this type of work, so I’m interested in hearing form folks who do as to what is missing and what would make this more useful.
My recent experience doing patent drawings(albeit for small-time American clients) is that the whole specific “patent drawing style” is obsolete. Whatever gets the point across is fine.
That’s been my experience too.
can you post it?
I did a lot of patent drawing work between 2000-10 Rayflectar Illustration
Used Rhino always as a starting point, but never as total solution. The main issue was shading, Utility patents use light shading using parallel lines (more so for design patents) and design patents occasionally require stippling. All this work needed to be done in Illustrator back then; heavy use of their live blend-curve tool since it also allowed to vary the thickness of the curves closer to an edge.
There is a drafting “suggestion” by the PTO originally published in the 90s which essentially created a patent “look” and feel, but they were never really militant about it. Occasionally (rarely) you get a drawing rejection, but I have seriously seen patents published with an attorney’s hand sketches.
Patent drawings are usually done nicely if the inventor has some pride in the printed patent itself. Otherwise stick figures do just fine. Large companies like GM, or Apple that don’t care about patent aesthetics publish some very crude drawings (often deliberately minimal and crude).
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The patent office believes that everyone makes drawings with black ink and paper, and that it is impossible to reproduce any color except black color. This is the reason why all colors except black are prohibited.
I thought it was to make sure that faxing a fax or copying a copy would always result in the closest possible version of the original.
I’ll rework it a bit and post a version if of interest.
Should I redo it to output an image than can be saved insted? Or is a pointcloud a good idea?
I figured a pointcloud would be good since points can be deleted and it’s easy to combine with a line drawing.
not sure- my 1st thought was for an image, but having it be something that could be edited is compelling- anyone else have an opinion?
Hi Kyle, all,
I don’t know how patent drawings are done in other countries but in the US you don’t need the stippling, in fact, you don’t even need a specific shading type of drawing, however, there are situations where the linetype does matter, and that’s only in design patents.
Here’s an example of one of my old (expired now!) design patents, all the solid lines means that those are defining edges that the patent is trying to identify as protectable invention:
you will also see parallel shading lines that are not touching the solid edges lines. Those don’t have to be parallel and can be in any direction, the can even be shading (like a shaded viewport) AFAIK
full patent will all illustrations here:
soundDock_USD514090.pdf (336.3 KB)
Now look at this other design patent example, where non-patentable elements are purposedly left as dotted lines, so the focus of the design patent is ONLY on the solid line stuff:
full patent will all illustrations here:
bose700_USD840973.pdf (260.6 KB)
We could argue about how useful design patents are, but more importantly you all should know that they really aren’t useful unless you have an army of lawyer to defend them, so in this case I’d better leave it to those lawyers to tell you specifically want they want you to draw, and how.
I’ve done design patents artwork, but it was always different, and always based on what the experts wanted me to capture, and not capture. So I’m not sure there’s a good automation workflow in place here, other than being able to using solid vs. dotted lines to various edges of a model.
Now, let’s talk about utility patents: These are the more important ones, and for these any drawing still works, even photographs are now accepted as illustrations.
Here’s a utility patent that I did by myself, it was all done in Rhino with Technical view and the shading lines were curves in the model.
full patents here:
tablet_stand_rhino_generated_US9335791.pdf (3.2 MB)
in this case the shading still is not important, it’s all about capturing the idea in the most unequivocal way possible (unless your strategy is to be ambiguous, but that’s a separate topic).
Here’s another utility one, where I gave the lawyers a few technical view captures and their illustrators added some extra shading lines:
full patents here:
thumbcam_US10075624.pdf (1.7 MB)
You can also get a different style perspective from sites like patently Apple, you will see they are even using shitty drawings and/or colors these days:
If you chase some of those Apple patents you will see that the nicest drawings are the design patents and you will also notice the difference between solid line (= we want to patent that!), dotted line (= that’s in the product, but if it was different that’s fine, it’s not defining the design elements we are patenting), and shading lines (usually not touching the other lines). The whole stippling thing… it’s more of a Wall Street Journal look, at least on this side of the pond.
I hope this helps,
Gustavo
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That’s super valuable information, thanks for thaking the time to write it all down and finding all the images.
None the less, if some are interested in a dotted shaded image to go with a 2D drawing I just updated the script with a lightness multiplier and a viewport frame to match the 2D drawing.
This could quite easily be combined into an automatic tool that also removes all points that are close to any lines from the make2D. But I don’t need that tool, so I don’t think I’ll add it just for the fun of it. So shout out if it would be useful.
PS! I could also combine it as an image, harvest the technical display, add the points to that image and present it in a viewer to save it.
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