Spline to arc conversions.

[MotorCityMinion]

Version X MR2

 

Noobish question indeed and I'm in way over my head on this one.

 

OK, I've got a nasty .IGS with a ton of poorly drawn splines in it. I need to clean this mess up before I start machining it. Heh, print says "Machine to CAD DATA". Not gonna happen. Data is no where near close to holding water and chaining is difficult. I did get quite a few surfaces with the .IGS.

 

Any thoughts on how to do this?

 

Is there a way to convert it to a solid, export it, and bring it back and simplify it so I can get some usefull arcs? I've tried breaking up the splines and converting to arcs. That gets ugly quick. I can take some liberties with dimensions, I just can't have gouges and strange rads appearing suddenly on the part.

 

I'll throw up a pic in the next post.

[strabe]

Did you try simplifying the splines into arcs?

[MotorCityMinion]

YUp, all the bores your seeing were splines, there arcs now.

 

 

 

[MLS]

IF you can convert it to a decent solid(~create solid from surfaces), or even somewhat close...I would suggest dumping all the wireframe that came in from IGES and ~create curves all edges from the solid.

 

Typically you get a LOT better result. At the least it is manageable that way and you can create individual edges if you need them.

 

The problem with IGES wireframe I find is that you get overlapping entities all over the place. There is a Chook called findoverlap that simplifies overlapping wireframe, but I have yet to use it and see how it works

[MotorCityMinion]

Lots of gaps in this one. I've used find overlap before and very rarely do I get issues with that or actually find overlaps. I'll try the convert to solids. This is a two piece part though and part two (in red) gets wired out of part one. I'll still need to get those splines fixed, then create the surfaces, surface to solid, create curves around all edges. Wish I had a full print.

[MotorCityMinion]

No luck so far. Turned the WF into a solid, created the curves, deleted the solid and was left with about 1/4 of the lines I needed. I might try this with Rhino and see whats happens. I'll keep messin with it in MC for a bit.

[Gary]

Send me the iges and I could run it through solidworks for you and see if it cleans it up. It usually works alot better than mc for conversions.

Gary

[MotorCityMinion]

will do

[Thad]

Motor City,

 

Can the customer send you a solid (parasolid)?

 

Thad

[MotorCityMinion]

No.

 

This particular customer is a middleman who specializes in re-manufacturing tools for older equipment in the aftermarket. Mostly reverse engineering. Usually he draws up his own stuff. I had the opportunity to review this drawing and recommended they stay away from it. Work in the milling dept. is slow and they took it anyway. Gotta make a right and left hand of this one and there is a smaller one that's even nastier. That's why I can take some liberties with the geometry. Even if i can get the geometry straightened out, I'm still in over my head on the surfacing. One thing at a time though.

[MotorCityMinion]

WOAH! Brought these into Rhino 1st, then saved as .3dm. Into MC they went and this is what I got. A HUGE improvement. Gotta learn Rhino now as my son helped me with these. High school cad class too, not too shabby.

 

 

 

[gcode]

Jim,

did you get my email.. maybe your companies

spam killer got me

[MotorCityMinion]

Jim?

[gcode]

quote:

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Jim??

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Sorry.. trying to do too many things at once this morning.. did my email get through..?? I sent it as a zip file and some firewalls kill zips

[MotorCityMinion]

I have to reboot to check mail, It's on a different drive. Will let ya know tomorrow.

[gms1]

Rhino was always my prefered choice to cleanup and bring in iges files. Those pics look alot better then some of the files ive done. Sometimes there is just no easy save for the mess engineers make.

[MotorCityMinion]

Files look good guys. Thanks for the help, MCM.