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Anyone doing this - POSER to SolidWorks

Hello,

Anyone here doing anything like this? I am working on some product that uses characters "designed" in Poser 4. Poser outputs a polygonal mesh. Using PolyTrans, I can convert this into a number of different formats, including IGES (we'll get to that) as well as STL.

I open the STL file in SolidWorks (as a Surface Body, Solid Body crashes and Graphics Body does not help me).

Jumping ahead to the real problem. I need to get the "doll parts" into SW so that I can do different things like add details for manufacturing, etc. I have seen software like GeoMagic and RapidForm that can convert from a polygon mesh to a flavored IGES, but at upwards of $20,000.00 cost. Frankly, if this is the only way to do this, I'll pop for the software, as I have a lot of this type of work to do. But if there is a way to do this without this expense, well... The IGES output from PolyTrans isn't much liked by SW, and I am not familiar enough with IGES to know exactly what SW is expecting. All the switches I have tried seem to crash in one way or another.

At the very least, I would like to bring in the STL, re-size it to make "presentable" in an assembly (to show, well, assembly of the unit) without crashing SW. Is there a way to convert the STL to surfaces or something (?) that I can manipulate in SW?

Thank you as always for any help.

Mike T.

Reply to
Mike Tripoli
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Mike Have a look at the Deep Exploration software - they have a CAD plugin for Solidworks and the STL support is pretty good going from Solidworks to Maya native. There is a fully useable 30day download at

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Deri

Reply to
Deri Jones

Maybe I wasn't clear: I need to go from polygonal mesh TO Solidworks native (as close as possible to something that I can work with IN Solidworks). PolyTrans will convert Solidworks native files to about every poly mesh format there is...

MT

Reply to
Mike Tripoli

Hi Mike,

This may not have a chance in hell of working, but what about poser output to DXF, which in poser 5 will output a mesh of solid faces, then use AutoCad's iges translator to output to iges?

Obviously this hinges on having a seat of acad & iges output. I will try this next week to see if it pans out (not at acad workstation right now).

I have the same problem Poser doesn't read any solidworks output and vise versa. Alternately something that reads & writes DXF & IGES - possibly a bunch out there that could do it. Unfortunately Solidworks cannot read the 3D faces from a DXF file, but it can read in the 3d wireframe if you can get the faces to output to lines - I used corel

10 (LOL!) for that.

I'm curious to see what you find - keep us posted.

Regards,

SMA

Reply to
Sean-Michael Adams

Mike,

Going from SW to polymesh is a snap, it's just a faceted approximation. Going the other way is an order of magnitude more difficult. You have to approximate smooth surfaces that lie on the facet vertices. then there's the problem of determining where the surface boundaries will be. At best you end up with an approximation of an approximation.

Software that does this semi automatically is very expensive, as you've found out. You might want to check and see if Rhino can do this manually.

Regards

Mark

Reply to
MM

Hello Mike,

I'm no expert, but I have done a lot of this. Basically what PolyTrans does, when outputting a mesh as an IGES, is put a flat triangular surface on each of the triangles in the mesh. As you can imagine, that could potentially be a very large amount of surfaces.

In my former position I worked a lot with GeoMagic, and although it is expensive it is an awesome program for exactly what you want to do. I have access to an older version of GeoMagic and would be happy to do something simple to show you what can be accomplished.

If your interested email me directly, Muggs snipped-for-privacy@comcast.net

Reply to
Muggs

Hi Mike,

I gave one message earlier, but I was able to use this to get a single surface into solidworks.

DXF out of poser -> into polytran demo -> .stl then into SW as a surface.

I'm not sure if you have the "full" polytran, but since i was in demo, I lost every 5th polygon and thats why I think I was not able to get it to knit into a solid. This might work if the surface mesh has no interuptions like in my demo generated file.

It's worth a try.

Later,

SMA

Reply to
Sean-Michael Adams

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