Spaceclaim 2014

[Chris Rizzo]

Spaceclaim 2014 is out, and has a new tab for "manufacturing". Nothing too revolutionary, but pretty slick. Still second-to-none for model repair and modifications. Also has now some nice new tools for working with meshes.

 

Those of you with 2012 sc already, go into sc options, then resources tab and click update.

[Jack Mitchell]

The cost makes this a no brainer as well

[Thee Rickster ™]

I am designing molds with Space Claim using the enclosure tab.

[K2csq7]

I've been using this to make solids out of STL's or repair bad models.

 

What's the biggest STL you guys have successfully throw at this?

Anything over 40MB loads, but it's sluggish as heck...

 

What is the best sequence to use the repair functions in?

 

i.e.

fix small gaps first

or

stich first

or

missing faces first????

 

Or does it not matter?

[Thee Rickster ™]

Keith, the repair tools are not the best, I tend to use solid works

first and then bring that file in to Space cl

 

usually stitch if successful will decrease the size as will the others, but I stitch first

[gcode]

It depends on the model.. Solidworks does better with some, SpaceClaim does better with others.

I get some ProE based models of huge castings for the Navy.

SolidWorks, Mastercam, NX5, and Catia v5 R19 all choke on them.

Spaceclaim opens them as watertight solids with no issues

[Manuel0822]

Just wondering, Is anybody using SpaceClaim for reverse engineering I.E. scanned point cloud data or STL's? How does it compare to Solidworks?

[EX-wccprogrammer]

SpaceClaim does not deal with point clouds particularly well. This is the main reason for their partnership with GeoMagic.

[Manuel0822]

Got it, From what I saw on the videos I thought it would do fine but now I get it. I still would like to see a complete video of it working on cloud data not only aligning a part.

[EX-wccprogrammer]

The solid generated from a point cloud is very large and not pretty. I use the mesh from a cloud as a guideline for constructing a 'clean' solid. It is relatively fast, and is much easier to deal with for programming and verification.

 

I have taken 100MB scan data and tried to convert to solid with SpaceClaim on a Friday afternoon, only to have a crashed computer on Monday morning. I am running 24GB of ram, and SpaceClaim uses ALL of it when converting solids.... for a long, long time. This is why you will not find a video of mesh conversion.

[Chris Rizzo]

Here is a link the video and what's new.

 

2014 is noticeably faster than 2012+.

 

If you have problem files, I have found their support to be extremely responsive and generally very inquisitive regarding user issues.

[Manuel0822]

Thanks, Chris.

 

That video does actually show a lot more than the one I saw before and it does sure looks a heck of a lot easier than solidworks.

 

EX-WCC, that's the way I go to but was just wondering if you still had to do intersecting curves and such. Looks like the integration with GeoMagic it's working off a lot better at least for common shapes recognition and moving/aligning your mesh to the axes.

 

Thanks for the feedback!