Hi All,

I thought I'd break away from this thread http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3824.1 mentioning Creo (CoCteate) personal edition for anyone who is interested in a free associative 2d drafting package where you can bring your models from MoI using *.step and making 2d drawings.
You could also tweak things around in your model using the Creo toolset and the drawings will update automatically.

Attached is a drawing I did of an existing MoI model with about an hour getting familiar with Creo, drawing outputs are limited but it does plot to PDF.

I think I'll be sticking with this until MoI has drafting capabilities.


Cheers

Hi Danny - that's great that it takes in 3D model data and can generate a hidden-line view as well.

The output seems to be broken down into a bunch of lines though instead of having bezier curves in the PDF file - did you possibly see any option for controlling this part?

I wish they would have stuck with the old name, the new name "Creo Elements/Direct Modeling Personal Edition" is kind of a mouthful.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> The output seems to be broken down into a bunch
> of lines though instead of having bezier curves in
> the PDF file - did you possibly see any option for
> controlling this part?

I had a search in the options and it doesn't look like there's anything that controls the type of line output to PDF, what's the reason you ask ?

> I wish they would have stuck with the old name,
> the new name "Creo Elements/Direct Modeling Personal Edition" is kind of a mouthful.

It is a mouthful, I was thinking if an acronym would be better, CEDMPE, it makes it worse :)

It's funny you mention this, when you launch the program the spash comes up with "Creo Elements/Direct Modeling Personal Edition 3.0" after it opens the name in the Title bar is "CoCreate Modeling Personal Edition" I wish they would make up their minds ;)

-

Hi Danny,

> what's the reason you ask ?

Well, it would be nice for some kinds of illustration work to have smooth curve segments instead of lines. Stuff like putting thicker line styles on some things, etc...

For just a direct printout the lines are probably fine, although in some areas it does seem to have used a pretty sparse number of them, like if you open your PDF in Acrobat and zoom in on some of the tire text in your PDF a ways it looks like this:



Stuff like that would just zoom more nicely if it was made up of smooth bezier curve pieces instead of only a sparse number of line segments.

- Michael

I see Michael, it does look crappy when you zoom in like that.
I'm not familiar with the out put of PDF is it more involved coding wise to get bezier curves?

-

Hi Danny, well there are "curve to" instructions that a path can contain in PDF files (instead of just "line to" for making lines), so it's not difficult to store bezier curves in PDF files.

However, generating all the stuff initially before even putting it in the PDF file is where the work is involved.

One thing that is kind of tricky is that NURBS curves can have what are called "Rational" curves (that's what the R in NURBS stands for) for things like exact circles or ellipses, but the bezier curves in PDF can only be of a more simple non-rational kind. So to get something like a NURBS circle curve into a PDF bezier curve, it has to be refit with a non-rational approximation of it. It seems like instead of doing that they just break it down into lines.


I guess the way they may break things down into lines is depending on the size of the printed page output, and those little areas of text on the tires would be small enough on your printed page not to see that they are messy like that with only a small number of segments.

But that also means that the output is not really a general purpose drawing that you can scale or process in too many other ways, it's something for printing just at that particular page size that it was created for. Certainly still useful for that purpose though.

- Michael

And it's a pity too, because to many name changes are generally not a good thing for a software product. I can recall off the top of my head all these names that CoCreate had gone by: Solid designer, one space modeling, cocreate, creo elements direct, me30 (though im not sure about that last one or if its like 20 years old)