.dat file format for freeform surface - through points?

[CliveK]

We have a mathmatically calculated set of X,Y,Z points defining the running surface of a worm/wheel system. What format do we need to export the points in in order to import them as the gridlines of a surface in UG?
(There are 100000s of points)

 

[Shadowspawn]

CliveK,
I'm not sure I'm following you with regards to: "...gridlines of a surface in UG?". I'm afraid I need a bit more info... what program are you using to calc the points, what will you do with the points once you import the point values into UG (create splines?, surf thru points?, etc), are you using these point values to generate geom or to check existing geometry (as in a dev anal of two surfs)?, etc, etc, etc... The more info we have to work with, the better we can help.


Regards,
SS
CAD should pay for itself, shouldn't it?

 

[CliveK]

SS,

It's a specially written piece of software that is calculating the points on a twisting surface, we want to use these points to create geometry. I referred to them as gridlines because it is calculating points on slices through the surface and if you joined all the points on each slice and then the 1st point on each slice, 2nd point on each slice etc you would get a grid of the surface.

Due to the accuracy required there are a large number of points so I was hoping to use a "free-form surface, through points, from file" but don't know the format required in the file.

Regards,
Clive.

 

[cowski]

The boxout below is taken from the help file (NX2, other versions should be the same).

I'm not very familiar with free form - through points, but from experience with other free form I must say it is possible to have too many inputs. For example, the thousands of points you have may not give you exactly what you want, if that happens you may try to reduce the number of points (or rows of points). This may sound counter-intuitive, but depending on how the through points method interpolates between points, it may give you better results.

Each row of points begins with the keyword ROW. Anything after the word ROW is ignored. This line is followed by the XYZ coordinates of each point in that row, separated by tabs or blanks. 

A sample "Rows of Points" file containing three rows of points to define a surface is shown below. Each line in each row denotes XYZ coordinates of the points.

Row 1
 
1.0 0.0 0.0
 
2.0 1.0 0.0
 
3.0 0.0 0.0
 
Row 2
 
1.0 0.0 1.0
 
1.5 2.0 1.0
 
2.5 2.0 1.0
 
3.0 0.0 1.0
 
Row 3
 
1.0 0.0 2.0
 
2.0 1.0 2.0
 
3.0 0.0 2.0
 

The first and last rows have three points in each; the second row has four points

 

[CliveK]

Thanks for that, it works now I have the right format. The only difference I found was that it refused to ignore anything after the keyword ROW but then they are just row markers and I didn't need anything else.

Thanks again,
Clive.