batch produce side views and vrml

My client is using Pro Engineering to design around 300 different plastic pieces. All colors, shapes, and sizes. We want to be able to get gif (or anything we can convert to gif) images of the side view and top view of each of the pieces. Also, we want vrml - Pro/E can produce vrml but not with curves. It just uses 3D points at a certain interval, which produces enormous, unusable vrml. The Pro/E user can produce png files, but he has to do each file manually.

1) Set the proper colour. 2) Spin the model to the specified view. 3) Create the png file. Is there a way to do this in batch, and to get small vrml files with curves?
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Lance Frohman
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: "Lance Frohman" wrote : My client is using Pro Engineering to design around 300 different plastic : pieces. All colors, shapes, and sizes. : We want to be able to get gif (or anything we can convert to gif) images of : the side view and top view of each : of the pieces. Also, we want vrml - Pro/E can produce vrml but not with : curves. It just uses 3D points at : a certain interval, which produces enormous, unusable vrml. The Pro/E user : can produce png files, but he : has to do each file manually. : 1) Set the proper colour. : 2) Spin the model to the specified view. : 3) Create the png file. : Is there a way to do this in batch, and to get small vrml files with curves? : : The only thing I can tell you about Pro/e's export to vrml is that the size varies greatly with the quality setting ~ the higher the quality, the larger the file. But there is no way that I'm aware of to make the curves show up, even when they are showing in the model. And there's no configuration option to turn such a thing on, either.

There may be more hope for the batch business through a standalone utility called Pro/BATCH. You'll find the batch file that starts PB in the /bin directory. PB doesn't actually do any batch processing by itself. When you've made your list of files with the Browser, when you've specified the action to take on the file and the option to use, you enter a batch name and a Pro/e command to run and PB generates the system commands and puts them in a .bat file. It is frequentlly used for plotting but it can generate commands for file exports, as well. As far as the orientation business is concerned, that requires a mapkey to call one of the saved views, probably, that would be included as part of the Pro/e run command. I'm just not sure of the syntax but I'm pretty sure I've seen this in the Help files. However, PTC has developed such a strange and complicated start up routine for Pro/e that it might require modifying the batch file that starts the program. Hopefully, someone else here is familiar with this part of the process.

David Janes

Reply to
David Janes

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