Hello, I am trying to save these tube profiles out of rhino and use in a 3D pipe bender however the pipe bending software isn’t recognizing the surfaces of the tubes to create its bend data. I am new to rhino, so I am wondering if I am building the profiles wrong in rhino or if there is a better option to export the file out as for other software. Currently I am having to redraw everything in solidworks and then save it out as a .stp file for the bending software.
Whatever the process was, it seems the larger bends got turned into “freeform” degree 3 curves instead of “actual” arcs, which I would hazard a guess could be part of the problem. The SimplifyCrv command will convert the curves to arcs and lines where possible, and it seems to make them go away here.
So my process to get most of the lines is to take the 3D model which comes to me in an xt format and I will then offset the surface the distance needed (most times it is 2.25-2.5"). I will then draw a grid over the surface and section the surface with those grid lines. I then hide the model and clean up the lines to get them to a shape that the bender we have can do. To fix some of the areas I am using the fillet curves command to put a 3" radius on all of the sharp turns and then I will take out sections that are arcs in between the radiuses and draw single lines in them.
The model I shared wasn’t cleaned up yet, but it was just the model that I was working on at the time.
The software I tried was bend pro, but I am currently talking to unison trying to see if their software can create the data. That is why I posted the question, this is 2 programs not able to translate the data that I was sure was more likely something i am missing since I am new to the software.