CATIA TREE to RHINO LAYERS

Rhino
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1

Hello,

Someone knows how a way to convert the CATIA tree (of a project) to LAYERS on Rhino?

Thanks,

2

What information are do you have? a .txt?

3

I have a project in CATIA. If i export that assembly in STP i lost the structure of parts.

4
  1. Open your design in CATIA.
  2. Go to the “Structure” tab in the top menu bar and select “Product”. This will open the Product Tree window, which shows the hierarchical structure of your design.
  3. In the Product Tree window, right-click on the root node of the tree (which represents your entire design) and select “Export Tree”.
  4. In the Export Tree window, select the format in which you want to export the tree structure (e.g. XML, CSV, etc.).
  5. Specify a name and location for the exported file and click “OK”.

This will export the tree structure of your design to the specified file.

5

Sometimes the STEP files will come in as nested blocks that mirror the Assembly and part tree in Catia. The Block Editor will show this. If this is the case there are also utilities to work those parts out to layers.

6

Here’s the utility that Scott mentioned.

7

You don’t understand my problem.

I have a CATIA PROJECT, every object is inside the CATIA TREE. I need a way to have the same structure in RHINO files.

I can see the structure in block manager but i don’t know how to transfer it on layers.
I try export the blocks and reloded but the positions of parts changes.

8

Hi @michele4 ,
did you actually tried to run the utility proposed by @Japhy?
I use it as well and it does a nice job.
You will not get a Structure tree in rhino because Rhino does not have it but you will get a layer, sublayer structure the same way as part, subparts.
If you get no layer structure maybe because it has ben not saved in the STP file.
If you post a sample file or some screenshot we can test it

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9

I will retry in next minutes, thanks.

Here a simple file if you want try
Example_x_export_from_CATIA.stp (1.5 MB)

10

Hi @michele4
look working fine for me, is this the structure You have on CATIA side?
You can find a short video about the import process here.

image
image1920Ă—1200 350 KB

1 Like
11

Hi @scottd , what about including this useful utility from @pascal to standard Rhino?
This option as been added already to Solidworks file import.
As pointed already on an old post( Export to STEP AP 242), I think STP import/export should be improved in Rhino
Thanks!

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12

HI all, in my experience, the ExplodeBlocksTo Layers script has been pretty unreliable for these reasons:

  • I never know which version is the best/latest, so many floating around on this website
  • it fails with out-of-memory errors in long/complex assemblies
  • it makes structures that are not thesame as native structures. when I compared it to what a Parasolid export imported into Fusion360 or SpaceClaim will do. The BlocksToLayers creates a lot of entities called Block 01, Block 02, etc. which is not what the original assembly has.

I do not know if the info is getting lost at the .step import or at the BlockToLayers moment.

We’d been wanting a good solution to be able to import > edit > re-export any Parasolid/Step assembly structure for many years. There’s no good way to do this in Rhino AFAIK. I recall some old discussion about this with @brian, but I think it was pretty complicated.

G

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13

Fully agree with you!
I am doing most of my 3DM ↔ STP conversion trough Spaceclaim actually which does a nice job converting Rhino Layers ↔ Components (Parts) both ways

14

We keep around one copy of SpaceClaim 2016 just for this. The issue with it is that it’s a workflow bottleneck because just one person can do this, and we have to save as rhino V5 to do it.

But yeah this was my request to the Spaceclaim team, pre-acquisition by Ansys. f I recall correctly, they coded it in 1-2 weeks.

I rather buy more seats of RHino than upgrade this one SpaceClaim seat.

G

15

I found a way but I have to convert first in our CAM software.

CATIA–>CAM software–>stp–>Rhino–>Run explode block to layer

it would be beatifull if Rhinoceros do the conversion in automatic. I think isn’t easy but it could be a wonderfull goal.

Thanks to all.

16

I wanted to point out something that is really a fado equivalence. I say it was hard to do for Rhino, but also that it was easy to do for Spaceclaim.

SpaceClaim has already a boy le structure system in their file for assemblies AND layers. so all they had to do was having one dictate the other for imports and viceversa for exports.

CAM systems also have this same assembly + layers structures. If I recall correctly Mastercam does.

Rhino does not have a develop assembly structure in their files, even worse, they have their block system with seems like a total nightmare. So I guess this is why this is hard.

The hardest part was doing the round-tripping of importing assembly > do modeling changes/fixes in Rhino > export again the assembly completely intact, except for the geometry inside now being improved with Rhino. I think this is the killer app for this. A lot of engineering teams/shops would benefit from this.

G

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