Hi Danny, there is definitely a possibility for that. But I kind of want to see how SAT and STEP work out first a bit before kind of diving in to Parasolid as well.

I can't remember if the HarmonyWare library supports both input and output for Parasolid, I will find out.

- Michael

Yes. I agree with Danny. I think the Parasolid (file format) is quite popular in CAM industry and it is often used as a geometric modeling kernel in CAM packages as well. So smooth interoperability between MoI and CAM would be ensured.

Another way to ensure a good result of creating a tool path geometry from a STL file would be to let users set up a "maximum distance to surface" for export to STL file (it is also on wishlist).

Petr

Hi Michael,

I'm wondering if STEP would be the right direction to include in the next set of translators for MoI, I've been in the engineering business for about 22 years now and remember when STEP was released in '95 and it was labled the translation format to supersede IGES, but I don't think it's taken off as first thought.

I'm sure you would of done your research but personaly I would really ask the industry who uses tranlators a lot and find out what translation format is 'really' preferred and not what you read, I know that the large manufacturing firms use STEP eg. GM and BOEING to name a few, they use it to translate not only model data also all other data that is attached to that model like Product Data Management, drafting, Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing, but I believe that the majority of the small businesses find STEP a complicated system, because of the different STEP standards so they opt for IGES (reason why IGES is still around) or Parasolid which will translate as a 'true' solid, also I forgot to mention that Parasolid will translate assembled models and stay as seperate assembled solids once translated, compared to IGES where you have to try and seperate the common mating surfaces of each part to try and join them to make separate solids, I believe STEP does this too but I'm not sure which standard.

Which STEP standard are you looking at is it STEP 203 ?

.

Hi Guys,

Step is a good translator to have on your side....however I do agree about XT parasolid and the integrity of solid data. Parasolid has intelligence
within the file which helps us do the many 'feature finds' in our CAM system, it also reports as true data should rather than all just free form.

The ability to export XT from Rhino would certainly get my vote but I get the sneaking suspicion it would increase the cost of the app no ???

Hey Paul,

> The ability to export XT from Rhino would certainly
> get my vote but I get the sneaking suspicion it would
> increase the cost of the app no ???

Now you've confused me dude................ http://www.rhino3d.com/4/help/fileio/file_formats.htm
did you mean MoI ?? :)

Cheers

Hey Danny,

Dohhhh !!!

Sorry I meant MoI......(Rhino on the brain)

Actually the exporter out of Rhino is rubbish and their answer to me was to buy Datakit because nobody gives
a flyin about engineering output...apparently anyway. Seemingly the translator was written by a graduate who then
well left.....

I hope MoI doesn't take this approach in years to come :-)

Hi Danny, re: Parasolid, it actually turns out that will not be an easy thing to add in anytime too soon.

HarmonyWare's Parasolid module is more of a work in progress - it actually only currently supports data import and not export yet. And actually the import is not fully refined yet itself either.

So sorry, that one is unfortunately not likely to happen right now.

- Michael

Hi Paul,

> I hope MoI doesn't take this approach in years to come :-)

No, I'm not very likely to get temporary interns to work for me... For my kind of work style that would just be too disruptive.

I'd rather license stuff from a company that is more dedicated to working on their stuff for a longer term.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I hear you...and thanks for the additional formats in the next beta ;-)

Hi Danny,

> I'm wondering if STEP would be the right direction to include
> in the next set of translators for MoI, <....>

Well, it's pretty much a no-brainer in this particular case, because it happened to be very easy for me to add it.

The STEP library is a companion to the IGES library that I was already using from HarmonyWare, it used the same kind of interface method so it was about as close as possible to just dropping in a new feature without doing much work on my part. That doesn't happen very often! :)

The only reason I did not use it for v1 was purely to reduce my initial business start-up costs.

I needed to add SAT export to enable export from MoI into Revit for use by architects, so I thought this would be a good time to also add STEP into the mix since it did not take much extra effort from me to do it.


I certainly agree that STEP did not live up to its initial marketing as being a complete solution to interop and a total replacement for IGES - any hugely complex specification is not going to solve interop, it just leaves too many variables when you let a whole bunch of different people write code to try and work with that huge written standard. The only real way to make things better is to have a common body of code that can be freely used so that it isn't up to a whole bunch of different implementers to all write their own complex code. But STEP did not do that.

At any rate, it can certainly be useful - many STEP translators are pretty refined at this point and typically support transferring solids instead of just surfaces. Although IGES can support solids it is often not supported so typically IGES will be surface data only and require stitching back into solids.

It's just another option that might come in handy for NURBS data transfer, that's the way I look at it.

I'm not making any kind of political statement that STEP is the "way of the future" or anything like that by including it.


> Which STEP standard are you looking at is it STEP 203 ?

Yeah, it's variant 203: Configuration controlled 3D designs of mechanical parts and assemblies.

- Michael

Some more details on Parasolid export - Sol Foster (he's the HarmonyWare guy) says that he may be able to dig into Parasolid format some more starting sometime next year.

But he'll need some help from people that are willing to test it, it will probably take a fair amount of back-and-forth testing to get it tuned up to work right.

There are a few parts of the Parasolid format that involve kind of chained lists of interconnected data which will probably take some iterations to get working properly.

- Michael

Thanks for the feedback Michael,

> Well, it's pretty much a no-brainer in this particular case,
> because it happened to be very easy for me to add it.

If that's the case, yeh do that, STEP would be most likely be my next choice of translator if Parasolid wasn't available and if it means doing less on your side that's a good thing too.
Seeing that MoI will have STEP and IGES then I guess it will cover most 3d solid programs, I haven't used STEP that much so it'll will give me a chance to test it on various models and cad programs.

Cheers

Just to show my gratitude to Michael about adding STEP & SAT file formats to the next release.
Especially ACIS SAT will be very helpfull for us in AEC business... for example The core of AutoCAD is based on the ACIS solids modeling kernel, so the ACIS .sat file format is a natural choice for exporting solids-based data with no loss in quality. Also supported by Autodesk's Inventor. Bentley's Microstation...

Mentionig that, are any plans for DWG OR DGN support? In my opinion that will make MOI a KILLER app.

And some cool news (Autodesk and Bentley will exchange software libraries, including Autodesk RealDWG)

http://pressreleases.autodesk.com/index.php?s=press_releases&item=436%3C%2Ftd%3E

http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Corporate/News/Interoperability+Agreement/Autodesk+Bentley+Agreement.htm

Hi Yannada, I'm glad that SAT will be useful to you. Please let me know how it works for you once you get a chance to test it.

Additionally it should be helpful for getting data into Revit, possibly that may be of interest to you in the AEC world.


> Mentionig that, are any plans for DWG OR DGN support?

I'd certainly like to add those, especially DWG, but it is unfortunately a lot more complicated task to get that done. SAT and STEP happened to be formats that had translators available that were totally set up to drop in to the geometry library that I am using - that's why I was able to add those so quickly.

I'm not really very familiar with DGN, but DWG has a lot of different kinds of entities in it, it will be a somewhat more complex format to support so it will probably take me a while before I can tackle that one properly. It should happen eventually though.

- Michael

Hi Yannada,
if your using Microstation you can actually export out IGES from a DGN file and bring it right into MOI. I am not sure if Autocad has the same capabilities or not, you might want to check for IGES exporter.
So at least with Microstation there is a work around. Take care.

Thank Michael, thats great news, In my opinion RealDWG is the way to go...

Hi Moe and thanks, to add Microstation is built upon the 'Parasolids' solids modeling toolkit; as such, it is always better to export in a "solids based" file format (such as Parasolids .x_t, ACIS .sat or STEP)

Autodesk also recommends ACIS SAT for Autocad, Revit, etc.
AutoCAD is based on the ACIS solids modeling kernel, so the ACIS .sat file format is a natural choice for exporting solids-based data with no loss in quality

Punch's ViaCAD is very reasonably priced. It imports .3dm files directly and will do things like trimming off solids with the imported surface, shelling a surface, thickening a surface - and exporting as .sat. Useful.

Hi Michael,

> re: Parasolid, it actually turns out that will not be an easy thing to add in anytime too soon.
> So sorry, that one is unfortunately not likely to happen right now.

That's ok Michael, just exported a STEP file from MoI and it works great, imported into my other apps as a single solid body
just the thing I wanted to see.

Thanks again.