I work in a machine shop and most of our customers are using Solidworks to generate part models. They often use a “hole wizard” to describe threaded holes rather than actually drawing in threads.
The problem is when I open the .SLDPRT file, there is no info about the threaded holes. The holes just look like a drilled hole with no threads. Also, the files I create become very large when drawing in all the threads. Is there a plugin for Rhino that would be equivalent to Solidworks “hole wizard”?
Rhino has a few commands for making and editing holes and you can see these by typing ‘hole’ in the command line. The auto complete list will show you the options here like MakeHole. These holes are not threaded though and it sounds like that’s a requirement here. I’d suggest looking at the BoltGen plugin off our resources page http://www.rhino3d.com/resources/?id=5647 I think it might be able to do what you need.
As far as importing the threads from SW. I bet this is some sort of custom geometry that would need to be exploded into real surfaces or solids prior to export. Try Step maybe as an export format and see if that does this behind the scenes.
I am currently using the BoltGen plugin. It works great for my needs. My problem is translating thread info back and forth to solidworks users. If I draw the threads in, my files are too large to send through email. If my customers use the Solidworks hole wizard, I don’t receive any info about the threaded holes when I open the SLDPRT file. From what I understand, SolidWorks hole wizard does not show threads, It just creates an associated label or name for the hole. So we don’t want to show the threads, we just want the “hole wizard” information to translate back and forth.
Thanks for the extra info. I can see a couple possible reasons that this hole data might not be surviving a round trip. The SW file is opened in Rhino but when Rhino writes it back out, it is without any associative relationships. For this reason the file is no longer parametric once imported into SW again. This hole wizard data is likely specific to the SW file and we aren’t preserving or rewriting it. We may not be allowed to actually but if you can provide a sample file I will see if it might be possible.
The making of smaller Rhino files may help regardless though. This is how I do it…
1- Save Small either from the File drop down menu or with the save small check box in the save as dialog. (This saves the file without the render mesh which can be quite a bit of the file size.)
2- Zip the resulting small 3dm. (This then makes it about half of what it was after saving small)
The hole data does not survive when Rhino opens the sldprt file. Attached is a file sent from my customer that contains 1/4-20, 3/8-16 and 1/2-13 threaded holes created with solidworks “hole wizard”. I had to rename the file with a .3dm extension because the forum will not allow me to upload sldprt format. You will have to rename the file with the sldprt extension then open it in Rhino. The only thing that shows up is the minor diameter of the thread.
Thanks, I see what you mean now. The outer diameter representing the thread is not imported as a curve in Rhino. I poked around SW but don’t see any way to extract or explode these feature notations into curve objects. I bet if we could get access to these as an actual curve it would then export… maybe. Have you asked SW support yet? I’ll talk to our developers as well to see if they think we can read this data or not in the sldprt. I’m not optimistic though after seeing how it is represented in SW… it seems like specific data for the hole feature that might only exist if the feature is seen in SW as part of the tree.
A couple of our developers looked into this and it doesn’t appear to be data that we can read when importing. I think the hole wizard is a SW specific feature and Rhino only imports surfaces not the hole and radius information as represented in a SW feature. If you can extract this outer diameter as a curve in SW prior to saving it might work as I mentioned although I’m not sure if that’s possible.