I’m trying to help someone out who has to clean up some files for RP, which were apparently modeled in Surfcam. Most of the fillets in the confidential files are highly troublesome, like I can’t understand how any manual or automatic filleting process could have produced them and considered them acceptable.
So I guess my questions are, does anyone actually model with Surfcam, or must it have come with somewhere else, and if these are Surfcam fillets and anyone is familiar with Surfcam if maybe there’s a tolerance setting or something for getting it to export reasonable surfaces?
Thanks,
Jim
Just adding to the theme here of bafflement at files I get from others, I was able to get a hold of a [name of big-iron CADCAM withheld] file for a [name of very large complex product withheld] and the modeling is just appalling. Now this isn’t the actual production 3D, I think, it’s a superficial version specifically for renderings. I don’t know if it was somehow ‘automatically’ generated but it’s terrible, everything is needlessly broken up into hundreds of tiny surfaces, no flat area is a simple plane, one variable fillet is broken up into a dozen different segments each with a different topology. What. The. Heck?
This sounds like the results of a push button conversion method available in some scan to nurbs applications. This method does not attempt to fit parametric surfaces, hence the lack of actual fillets or flat planes.
There are some reverse engineering applications that will build a parametric model with the feature tree (history) that could be used in Solidworks for example. Generally this type of model is very clean. It is a manual process with some automation and does take time, although its faster than cutting/sectioning a scan for manual curve tracing for the basis of the surface creation.
It sounds like someone was trying to save some time, or perhaps did not have a license of the software needed to create a parametric model from a scan.
I’ve seen lots of auto-reverse-engineered surfaces, and these are too precise, in a way, for that. I think what’s going on is trying to simplify a hideously complex engineering model for rendering, possibly using some automagic ‘shrinkwrap’ function, and possibly by someone with more “graphics” type modeling experience. Of course I’m being very obtuse, it’s a very proprietary model, but I need to vent exasperation sometimes…