I believe that Michael uses some libraries of this firm ;)

I use Solidworks at work and at home for graphics work and do the same thing. Solidworks/IGES/MOI/OBJ to render. It would be sweet to have leave out the solidworks but sometimes you need to chop up the assembly into smaller bites for MOI to handle.

Speaking of that it would be nice during import to use multi-core support. I have noticed when bringing in large assemblies that only one of my cores is taking an ass beating. Is multi core use during import possible, I have seven others that sit around and kick rocks. I have not check but during meshing is that a single core process as well?

I believe that Michael uses some libraries of this firm ;)
---
Pilou

Correct.

Moi is also slow here with large iges files, thougt it may be my hardware...only 4 cores 4 ram here.

EXLib a new tessellator is designed to take full advantage of multi-core processors

http://www.integrityware.com/EXLib.html

>>EXLib a new tessellator is designed to take full advantage of multi-core processors

One of the beauties of MoI that is not apparent at first, Michael wrote his OWN Tessellator. I beleive there is a thread where someone states the new Sollids ++ one gives 5-10 percent faster results and Michaels is already 25 percent faster, so that would be a degrade for him! :)

Hi yannada,

re: SolidWorks Native File format

Unfortunately I don't think it is quite as simple as that, from what I understand that exporter to SolidWorks that you are talking about is not a self contained export module that I could use but rather an interface to another export library called Datakit.

I'm not exactly sure if that is an additional piece that you would need to buy to make it work or if it is an additional piece that needs to be licensed by me or what, I have asked the person who makes those translators what the deal is on that one.

But I think that it will likely not be an easy thing for me to add in.

I'm pretty sure that SolidWorks for the past several years now has included a .3dm import module as a standard part of SolidWorks. Does that not work properly for you?

- Michael

Hi yannada,

> Moi is also slow here with large iges files, thougt it may be my
> hardware...only 4 cores 4 ram here.

There are a few things you can do before you import that can help speed it up.

The first thing is go to Options / View / Meshing parameters, and switch the "Mesh angle" parameter to 20 and uncheck "Add detail to inflections".

This will make a coarser display mesh for surface display - by default MoI is set to make a quite dense mesh which makes for a very smooth and good looking display but can really chew up quite a lot of memory when you are dealing with a large assembly.

I would like to do some kind of automatic "throttle down" in the future but currently you need to manually turn it down.


Also quite a bit of the time spent in importing an IGES file is in the process of joining surfaces into a solid. In the latest v2 beta there is an option to turn off joining under Options / Import/Export / IGES options / Join surfaces on import. If you turn that off it will import more quickly but also come in as individual surfaces though too.

You may get a faster import using STEP format instead which stores the edge connectivity information so that a full joining process does not have to happen.

- Michael

Hi Grendel,

> Is multi core use during import possible, <...>

Well, I'm using licensed libraries to do pretty much all the work for IGES import... So I am dependent on those libraries getting updated to support multi-core processing.

It tends to be a quite difficult coding task to convert existing code over to work on multiple cores, so it will probably be a while before that happens.


> I have not check but during meshing is that a single core process as well?

Currently meshing is single core as well. However, that is all my own code so that is something I have a lot more control over, and I expect for this part to get multi core enabled sooner than importing would.

But I'm not sure exactly when like I mentioned it is not like you flip a switch and get multi-core happening, there is a lot of specific design for it involved.

- Michael

Hi Yannada - I've talked to HarmonyWare about the SolidWorks module that you had seen on the Solids++ web site.

It is currently not really finished up, it is in a "long term" beta release at the moment and is for import only.

It does not really sound like it is all ready to go right now, I do not really expect to have that available for v2 currently.

- Michael

>Unfortunately I don't think it is quite as simple as that, from what I understand that exporter to SolidWorks that you are talking about is not a self contained export module that I could use but rather an interface to another export library called Datakit.

I see, I think Datakit is also what Rhino is using, last time I tried i was not that happy with it, but it maybe improved by now..

>I'm pretty sure that SolidWorks for the past several years now has included a .3dm import module as a standard part of SolidWorks. Does that not work properly for you?

Corect and it does work just fine for me, in fuct geometry created in Rhino some times is not recognised by SolidWorks, when I open same .3dm in MoI and save out from MoI then it works just fine with SolidWorks.
Have not idea why but it suits me... (MoI Magic)

>There are a few things you can do before you import that can help speed it up.

The first thing is go to Options / View / Meshing parameters, and switch the "Mesh angle" parameter to 20 and uncheck "Add detail to inflections".

Also thanks for Importing IGES Tips, Ill try that...

>You may get a faster import using STEP format instead which stores the edge connectivity information so that a full joining process does not have to happen.


Cool i did not know that... would you say STEP is a better format to export from solidworks to MoI? and if not witch one? could you elaborate a bit...

>It is currently not really finished up, it is in a "long term" beta release at the moment and is for import only.

Import only is good enough for me since SolidWorks supports .3dm

>It does not really sound like it is all ready to go right now, I do not really expect to have that available for v2 currently.

v3 is also good for me since it looks like I am gonna be here for some time...
Once again Thanks Michael for your support and your concrete answers.

Hi yannada,

> Cool i did not know that... would you say STEP is a better
> format to export from solidworks to MoI? and if not witch
> one? could you elaborate a bit...

It would take some testing to know whether it was actually better or not, I mean theory is not always the same as practice.

But the part that is good about STEP is that it should contain full solids in the file data instead of only surfaces.

By that I mean that the data in the STEP file records how surface edges are joined to other surface edges.

IGES files typically only contain individual surface data, and not any of the edge-to-edge join data. So that means that usually there has to be a joining process that a program has to do after importing IGES data to analyze the surfaces and figure out itself which things should be joined together in order to glue the surfaces into a solid.

That is actually a pretty complex procedure, so it can be good when it is possible to skip that particular step when that connection data is already present and does not need to be calculated, which should be the case typically for STEP data.

But you know, it is not very unusual for there to be some kind bugs or problems in one particular translator and not another, so it is not so easy to just say that one format is just universally always going to work better than another.

- Michael

Hi Yannada, I talked to HarmonyWare a bit more about the SolidWorks translator.

He says it is not really production ready currently, there are still a few major issues to solve, and he does not currently have an exact timetable for when he will be able to fix those.

So I'm not even really sure it will be a v3 thing, but I guess it is a possibility.

- Michael

thanks for valuable info.

fingers crossed

I use Solidworks every day at work and we rely alot on translations back and forth with vendors. All of the vendors we work with prefer .STP (step) over .Iges.....