too many surfaces!!

[Festus]

I have a mold to make and the file the customer sent me has 1193 untrimmed and 324035 trimmed surfaces. my poor 'puter is having a conniption with that!!! any thoughts or ideas on how to shrink the file? 243,360KB

[#Rekd™]

What type (program) of file was it?

[Guest]

I have a mold to make and the file the customer sent me has 1193 untrimmed and 324035 trimmed surfaces. my poor 'puter is having a conniption with that!!! any thoughts or ideas on how to shrink the file? 243,360KB

 

Yup, I have has some molds to program that were similar.

 

I tried to separate things onto different levels so I could only have on what I needed.

 

Not a perfect solution but it helped.

 

One thing is I hope you have a heavy duty video card too

[Jayson Kramer]

1) Have you checked for duplicate surfaces?

 

2) Have you looked to see how many of these surfaces may unblanked parent surfaces that can be removed?

 

3) is this model of the whole mold hot and cold half including base?

 

4) if yes to ( 3 ) then start with what john stated about levels and make levels for hot half and cold have and base components.

 

5) to go along with ( 4 ) use level sets and mark the accordingly to hot and cold haves for easy control of large sets of levels..

 

Just a few thoughts. ps do this configuring without shading at first as much as you can to save on video horse power.

[Festus]

Hockey... step file from Pro E. Jparis...I need all surfaces at once. this mold is for a tub surround. there are hundreds of thousands of tiny triangular surfaces? even on flats? Jay i think that answers some of your questions too? My first thought was to check for duplicates as well...none.

 

 

[Festus]

computer info

[BenK]

What do you have for a video card?

[Festus]

video has dedicated 1GB ram as well

[iowajim62]

ask the customer if they could send an IGES format file to try as an alternative

[#Rekd™]

Which Nvidia card is it?

[BenK]

I would look into a better video card if you work with these kind of files a lot. An FX card is better than a gaming card. Also try running "Ram saver" on your file it should reduce the size.

[Müřlıń®]

Take that stl file and have it converted into a solid by someone who knows what they are doing.

 

It might have a step extension, but it is an stl.

 

It is proly a scanned model from xspoint cloud.

 

Tell customer to give u an iges and an stl format.

 

Then Rhino, Solidworks, Geomagic or Verisurf can either make a usable solid, or form a mesh that can be solidified by your system.

[Teh Bear without Brains kinda idiot]

iN SHADE settings uncheck all entities setting

Shade only what you need

Unselect all the options you don`t need

raiz chord height option ,uncheck mouse dynamic

 

Simplify lightning scheme as much as you can

This will ease up working with shading .

Try to separate surfaces as much as you can .

 

I used file 10 years ago with 150000 surfaces.

All the things I mentioned helped me .

Calculation is the other matter.

Try to use surface parallel as much as you can

it is the fastest toolpath in this situation

[CJep]

IMO Murlin has a valid point, if you have the ability to work with solids that would be the better route.

 

I have personally worked with files that were 50000+ surfaces that were a major problem child

Large STL files,....100+meg (not so good)

 

Using a solid model usually fixes a number of issues.

 

Take that stl file and have it converted into a solid by someone who knows what they are doing.

[Festus]

Thanks guys...I had turned the surfaces to a solid in MC, but that only made the file larger... also tries an .iges file and ended up in worse shape that before...Mulin i will try your approach...the problem is the tub surround has tiles with a texture on them. i had the customer send a file with smooth tiles for roughing and then he seperated each tile for me for my finishing? rather tedious, but I think it'll get the job done in the end. and I am in the process of upgrading as well.. see attached..will this work?

[Müřlıń®]

If you can manage to get the file turned into a dumb parasolid before bringing it into mastercam the file shoud be more manageable.

 

Then you can always machine surfs from that if you have hardware limitations.

[iowajim62]

Good Idea Murlin

Another thought is to do a save some and save off the solid you created as a separate file to toolpath with.

I would add as much RAM to that system build as you can, 2 GB is awful low nowadays.

[CJep]

the problem is the tub surround has tiles with a texture on them.

 

Mcam no matter what version doesn't play well with textured surfaces.

[Mic]

Good Idea Murlin

Another thought is to do a save some and save off the solid you created as a separate file to toolpath with.

I would add as much RAM to that system build as you can, 2 GB is awful low nowadays.

 

Festus has selected 4 pcs. of 2GB modules. I also run 8GB and it works fine.

[Mic]

Thanks guys...I had turned the surfaces to a solid in MC, but that only made the file larger... also tries an .iges file and ended up in worse shape that before...Mulin i will try your approach...the problem is the tub surround has tiles with a texture on them. i had the customer send a file with smooth tiles for roughing and then he seperated each tile for me for my finishing? rather tedious, but I think it'll get the job done in the end. and I am in the process of upgrading as well.. see attached..will this work?

 

The system looks fine, but I would go for a single CPU solution with a newer and faster CPU. Something like Core i7-2600K or XEON E3-1245.

 

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

[Festus]

^^^^ thanks i'll definately look at that