My organization is looking to use Cabinet Vision (or any other CAD/CAM software) for manufacturing and ShapeDiver as a client configurator. We spoke to Cabinet Vision and their representative told us that our best bet is to export our ShapeDiver model/convert our model to XML. I did some digging and found that exporting as XML is supported on the grasshopper docs (https://grasshopperdocs.com/components/shapediver/exportShapeWays.html) and in an old blog post from 2019 (https://www.shapediver.com/blog/shapediver-plugin-release-notes-november-2019/) but our modeler does not see the option for it in the grasshopper ShapeDiver library.
Is this supported? and if so, does anybody have any experience with using XML with CAD/CAM?
The documentation was slightly outdated, I added the XML extension to the list ShapeDiver supports. Indeed, it is possible to export a text file with the .xml extension.
However, be aware that you will need to define the logic to build the XML file in Grasshopper yourself, either by using the Concatenate components or (much more efficient) by writing a script. If you need support with building these XML files in Grasshopper, get in touch with Ezequiel to discuss your options.
LunchBox has (sort of) XML capability. But you cannot designate the output format, which makes the plugin not quite usable if you are exporting sth into a complicated XML exchange format. It’s good enough for parsing XML.
@gankeyu Thanks for the suggestion, that is very useful! What is your plugin? We could have a look at it and add support for it in the future.
@kyle2 For now, Lunchbox is indeed a good solution because it is already supported on ShapeDiver, so you will be able to parse and build XML files using it. You can download it here.
That’s my plugin, Pancake. However, the XML capability hasn’t been merged into the current branch. A newer version is supposed to be released in a few days.
