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.