Hi,
Is there a way to measure the distance between objects ? Also I would like to measure surface area and volume.

Thanks for your time.

Hi jetblast, easiest way to measure distance between 2 points is to draw a line, - while you are drawing it the length of the line is displayed in the "d" field in the bottom toolbar just beneath the x,y,z coordinates.

Then instead of actually finishing the line, hit escape to cancel it.

There is also a plug-in you can install to get a "CustomDistance" command here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/#MeasureDistance

There isn't currently any function set up for measuring surface area or volume. In the future I want to add those in but for now you would need to export your model to a different CAD program to obtain those measurements. Rhino or ViaCAD can work good for that. Also if you export to STL format there are various STL viewer/analyzer programs that can give you a measurement from that as well, like this one: http://software.materialise.com/minimagics

- Michael

STL is like Polygon format or similar?
As there is a conversion Nurbs to polygons is there a difference between a volume in Nurbs and the result after conversion?
Can we estimate the difference in general ? +- 0.001 Unity

Hi Pilou,

> STL is like Polygon format or similar?

Yup, it's a polygon format.


> As there is a conversion Nurbs to polygons is there a difference between a volume in Nurbs and the result after conversion?

Yes there will be some small amount of error because of the polygon conversion. It should be pretty small though.


> Can we estimate the difference in general ? +- 0.001 Unity

It's hard to estimate it directly, it depends on various model-specific factors like how curvy the surfaces are. If you need particularly high accuracy you may want to use another CAD program to do the measurement rather than using the STL method, unless of course you were actually planning on using some STL based method for generating the physical part in the first place.

- Michael

Something like freecad http://www.freecadweb.org/ sems has some volume dimensions
even curiously they have not 3dm format ! 3dm is not OpenNurbs?
STEP, IGES, OBJ, STL, DXF, SVG, STL, DAE, IFC or OFF, NASTRAN, VRML in addition to FreeCAD's native Fcstd file format.