First of all we do not have the budget for Revworks. Reverse engineering is not our business. The Microscribe arm came with MUS software which doesn't help a lot. I need to digitize very organic shapes and make solid models in SW. I MUST NOT BE ALONE HERE. Has anyone got a macro or some shareware that would take XYZ input from the MUS software, or from an Excel file and generate contours which I could then loft in SW? Another approach might be to create a bunch of guide curves to sweep with. Anything similar?
snipped-for-privacy@cymatech.com wrote in news:1146515681.124038.124550 @i39g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
I use HighRES, with a Romer arm. I'm not familiar with MUS. If it can generate XYZ data, you can probably make it work for you. You'll have to be sure that you are taking the right data though. You can't just take points randomly on a surface and expect to build a clean model from that.
We use fine line tape (1/16 or 1/8") and lay out curves and guides on the part that we would use to build the sruface natively in SW. You can digitize points on those lines, import to SW using any number of macros available on the web, and build your geometry to them.
One caution, as you're building your mesh, node to node contact is important (where your tape lines cross). Only take one point at those locations. We had three solid days of training on the techniques of reverse engineering when we bought our arm. It was extremely useful.
With some creative thinking, you can make this work for you. You WILL end up wasting some time, making mistakes along the way.
I hope this will help, anthough, strictly speaking, it is off-topic.
Quite a few years ago when I was in lightning studies at University of Toronto, we wanted to model return strokes (the easily seen lightning that strikes clouds, earth-based objects or and sometimes anything in-between). We had a camera for XZ and a camera for YZ. We also had an XY camera, but the image was necessarly distorted and unusable without considerable signal conditioning --that we did not want to do). (Civil engineering details abbridged), one of our researchers (Ding On Yuen) made a programme (in Fortran) that combined these two to yield an XYZ (field-delimited file) output. Later we hacked together something similiar with Mathematica (on SGI reality machines). I can look for the code (but doubt I have it anymore); but I cannot believe that we were the only team to make this sort of algorhythm. So, you should be able to find plenty. This worked quite well for us (lightning path modeling).
Good idea with the tape. That'll make it easier for sure. For my purposes I need the contours horizontal and parallel, so I'm using a laser level which is really helpful too.
MUS is just Microscribe Utility Software. doesn't do anything too fancy, but lets you set up coordinate systems, parallel planes, etc.. It's NO help getting data into SW in any useful way.
Where, on the web, might I find these macros you mention? That's the kind of thing I'm looking for.
I searched a bit for that kind of software myself, but didn't find any. My memory is vague here about what I ended up doing... I know I just used AutoCAD to generate 3-D polylines, but I can't recall if I successfully imported those into Solidworks. Another alternative is to just generate points. You can edit the output of the MUS software to type "point" before each coordinate.
If you don't have AutoCAD, the DWG Editor that comes with SW should be able to accept the MUS input.
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