I have a new customer who is trying to get some standards information to me. These guys don't seem to even know what a drawing is. He keeps trying to just send me an iges file and I am supposed to pull dimensions off of that.
All I am getting into SW is a mass of surfaces. Even if he exports parasolids-it's still just surfaces. One thought I have is that perhaps he is exporting from PowerMill. Would it be better if he were to export from PowerShape (the modeler)?
Boy, do I need help with this. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.
Good luck. It's not always easy to export OUT of PowerShape to any of the parasolid based modelers. I've used PowerShape for many years. It does many things VERY VERY well. But exports ain't always one of 'em. The problem being is PowerShape is very tolerant of open edges and such.
One thing that HAS worked for me in the past is this:
convert the solid to surfaces. Then select all surfaces. go to the edit menu, go down to convert, then click surface. This will convert all surfaces to "power" surfaces. You then need to simplify surfaces to outside trim(toolbar item in the"surfaces" toolbar). change your tolerance to at least .0002" then re-create the solid, and make it watertight. Then export to either iges, step or parasolid.
Woops, I didn't really read your entire message. If what you're after is the 2D info, well, that's difficult at best. Here's what your customer needs to do: Enter "drafting mode". FILE: Open Drawing(each powershape file can contain several "drawings". Now, they need to right click on each "view" and click "convert", a popup box will come up, then need to select "drawing", not "view". WARNING, this will loose their associativity to the 3D model. But can be "undo" after export. Yes it's a pain I've lived with too long to export. But anyways. After they've converted every view, they then need to press CTRL-A to select all within the drawing. Then go to File==>Export choose autocad, and voilia it will work. Kinda. The problem being is text. Unless they've used "duct" font, the text may be a bit screwy. Now after export, they need to click undo untill they get the boxes around every view they've previously "converted".
Have fun, and GOOD luck! This is a VERY large reason I don't use PowerShape for mold design any longer. It was FAST at making the design, but things like 2D exports were far too challenging to make it worthwhile.
I have kept a copy of your advice for the next time this comes up. John Carroll was able to import the problem iges file into Vero and output parasolids for me. That was fine for my immediate needs, but it's good to know that there is a better way to handle this.
Only reason I mentioned 2-d was that if there were a standard for the propritory stuff I was adding to my design, I could have modeled it off of that.
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