Gcode input, surface output

LOL .... Ask jon_banquer in alt.machines.cnc for help.

Nice 5 axes surfaces & solids, right?

Now was THAT nice? The poor guy will probably post there expecting Jon to actually help him.

You need a backplotter. Check out CGTech vericut.

you had to say that....

He does not have to post there. He got the help he needed from me right here.

That he did not get it from Cliff, and that Cliff says what this man wants to do can't be done, would be *no surprise* for many of us in alt.machines.cnc. who realize that Cliff has no idea what is going on in today's small machining job shops.

Cliff has no machining experience in the last 20 years and even then it was very little.

Many of us in alt.machines.cnc also know that Cliff has NEVER used SolidWorks.

jon

Reading comprehension problems yet again?

What part of "CGTech has planned support for native CAD formats" is SolodWorks?

And what part of an STL file (polygon mesh) is a SolidWorks surface?

Throw away that nice (but useless engineer-trash) design .... make scrap the official part ....

"Complete with machined features" is getting pretty fancy ...

(This is the "aerospace machinist" whose measuring tools come right out of the dinged-up box, no certs or inspections of them, and makes constant MDI edits to "controlled" processes .....)

See? I said he'd help ....

No clues about Vericuut here .... not even what it's for.

Took much of the fun out of it right there .

(He thinks his BS sells better here ... he used to post about SW to AMC .)

"Reverse posting" back to actual NERBS based solids ....from plain old G-code ..... LOL .... it does not even contain geometric tool data ... is that a .250" or a 1" drill ..... LOL ....

Have YOU ever actually used Vericut? Nope.

Making any progress at learning 2D BobCad? Planar lines & circles working yet? LOL ....

But is always correcting jb's endless BS .... .

Now, now, watch that temper ... (a larger size in the rubber undies department. might help) ... I've freely admitted I am not a current user of it .... several times .

How about you, jb? Is the latest release of SolidWorks pretty good for making 1 inch holes at random locations and depths?

LOL ....

MCuser,

Actually, Mastercam will probably work better for what your trying to do than SW. You can rev post standard vanilla Fanuc to get a bazillion connected line segements. You can then select "chains" of lines and convert those to splines, and from there to a surface.

If you could reduce the G-code to a X.xxx, Y.yyy, Z.zzz, table, you could read this into SW as curves through points. You would have to selectively seperate U,V, sets prior to this in Mastercam though. Saving as ASCII in MC usually yeilds a simple XYZ text file (like I mentioned above) Reading in the whole shebang into SW at once will probably kill your computer.

So, I guess the answer is no, not directly. There may be a third party add in for this, I haven't checked out the SW partners list for a while. You can do it using MC and SW, I think I could, but it wouldn't be a slam dunk. I did a boat plug once (about killed me).

What you basically have is a point cloud. Most programs that work well with this type of data (Raindrop Geomagic for instance) are very expensive. Rhino may be able to do it, haven't used it in a long time.

Regards

Mark

Neil,

Don't let the FACT that this is an uncensored and unmoderated newsgroup and that I don't and have not violated the charter of this newsgroup in anyway get in your way of making up stories as you see fit.

ROTFLMFAO

.jon

MC,

I forgot to mention that you need to know the diameter of the endmill that the program was written for. The g-code usually represents the centerline of the ball end. You'll have to offset your surface by the radius of the cutter to get anything near accurate. And this will "only" work for a ball end, which has a constant offset from the surface. If the program was written for a bull nose your outta luck.

Regards

Mark

And there are *lots* of more complex tool shapes.

Thank You Mark,

I'm a little too late to chime in, but you're exactly right. I did this in MasterCam a couple of years ago for a client, it's a PITA, but it can be done. Reverse post and turn on "create geometry form tool path", or something like that (I'm at home). And then build your surface from those spline using a loft and offset the surface the radius of the cutter(it's in the G-code). I never thought about it but yes you probably could create a comma delimited file(I think that's what it's called), using the X,Y,Z coordinates from the G-code, and create a "point cloud" and surface it in Geo(Raindrop GeoMagic).

So, MasterCam User, if you ever get to the point where you get a comma delimited file, I would love to try to surface it in Geo.

Muggs

Simple enough to "reformat" the file using any programming language, even BASIC. Now, about those arcs ....

Clueless is an absolute total idiot. Another fine example of banquerbabble.

Clearly again he has demonstrated that he knows zilch about programming as it relates to any computer language known by man or alien. Or about basic CAD/CAM or CNC machining or programming or even data entry.

Vericut might cost $35,000 or so as a stand-alone and it's probably about an hour's programming effort to parse the G-code file, a little more if you want to convert circular moves to arc segments.

Most of it is just dealing with possible formats, incremental or absolute, I,J or R arc formats ... and throwing much of the input data away anyway.

Don't forget that on most controls coordinate addresses are modal these days so redundant code is stripped by the postprocessor ... so you need to keep a record of "where was it before" .... so as to output redundant coordinates to get 3D point data triplets. Should anyone want to make the effort.

Hi Jon,

I really don't know anything about Vericut as I've only used MasterCam for the last 8 years or so. Actually the last (only) time I had to do it was back at version 5.5, and I don't know if the option to save as geometry even exists in MC any more.

As far as the points data goes, I was just wondering if it could be done, that's all. I wasn't trying to say it would be the best or most efficiant way to do it.

Muggs

It don't have any doubt that it could be done.

Well the major problem is that we don't know exactly what mastercamuser really wants to do. We also don't know how big this project might actually be or what accuracy he needs to achieve.

If mastercamuser does want to convert to NURBS and he is going to go the Raindrop GeoMagic Studio route he could save a s*it load of time with Vericut and it's Model Export module.

BTW, any idea when CNC Software is suppose to release MasterCAM X ??? Luckily I have not had to use MasterCAM since Version 5.5. Perhaps MasterCAM X might be tolerable.

jon

Accuracy can be no greater than the accuracy of the input data which is usually truncated or rounded to 3 or 4 decimals past the decimal point.

And we have a pretty good idea what he wants to do .... and it does not requre your high-cost "small shop" option calling for the purchase of Vericut AND NOW GeoMagic as well.

Too bad the last demo of MasterCam you saw was 5.5 ... LOL.

Well asshole finally you have something to say that makes some sense. Additionally, from how I see it he's going to lose further accuracy if he has to go the STL to NURBS route with Raindrop GeoMagic Studio.

No we don't. Tell us what accuracy mastercamuser needs, Cliffy. I I failed to note that important FACT in his post. Amongst all your other "skills"... your now a mind reader as well, eh.

Wrong again, asshole although I wish it had just been a demo and I wasn't stuck using the piece of crap that it was. Anyone remember the "brilliant" MasterCAM TV (MCTV) in ver

Of course you would have *no idea* Cliffy because like SolidWorks you have *NEVER* used MasterCAM either.

LOL

jon