Help Converting Thousands Of Horrible Sheet Bodies To A Solid ( see jpeg )

[Marlborough]

Help Converting Thousands Of Horrible Sheet Bodies To A Solid ( see jpeg )

So I just finished off a really unpleasant design project. Had to convert over 13,000 thousand poor quality unparametized studio sheet bodies into a solid. And by poor quality, I mean 80% of these sheets don't lineup edge to edge.

Sewing the sheets as is resulted in the image below. Took me over 3 weeks of recreating all the surfaces to finally obtain a usable solid body.

Can anyone think of a faster way of doing this ?

 

[JohnRBaker]

Have you looked at...

Insert -> Offset/Scale -> Sheets to Solid Assistant...

Check the NX Help documents describing this function as it might provide you with some helpful tools and options.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[Marlborough]

Sorry, I should have mentioned that the surfaces I'm converting are not just one side of the body used for a thickening operation. They are all the surfaces, when sewed together, create a non-uniform thick enclosed solid body.

 

[JohnRBaker]

It appears, at least from you images, that this is a repeating pattern. If so, I would isolate the surfaces down to just what's need to create a single instance of that pattern, clean them up, get them to solidify and then replicate as needed.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[Marlborough]

That was my hope too. Unfortunately, it's an automotive grille with elliptical curvature in 2 directions (up/down and side to side).

 

[SDETERS]

I would look into what created these surfaces in the first place. What software was used to generate these surfaces? How were these surfaces born if you will. Maybe there could a better job upfront which could make your life easier.

 

[John2025]

I don't have any ideas for you other than SDETERS idea, but we all know that rarely works, especially if it's coming from your customer. You sure have my sympathy, though. Sounds brutal. Do you have any hair left?

 

[Nham]

Hi everyone,

This particular topic got me to log in and write my similar experiences.
Especially step translation is a sore topic to our company. After translating oem parts or other commercials that have proE origins we face issues. Truth is that garbage in garbage out applies. Usually when these parts have been exported to step there are sheet bodies already created to that step file. After this you can't easily just import the part to nx as solid bodies.

Sheets to solids assistant is not helping in automotive or cast parts and some tolerances are wrong and surfaces flipped. There are programs that can fix these easily but they are external to Nx and extra effort to use for normal users.
While responsible party sees translators working as intended, we would like to see the translators work directly from sheets to solids with no sewing and surface work.

Nx version is irrelevant in this case. We use 7.5 and same applies to all newer releases too.

It would be nice to hear what kind of workflows others have treating and importing these kind of models and how you manage to serve yur business in a robust way when they request to have a broken model fixed.

First post and a really long one...
NH

 

[Xwheelguy]

This is a common issue, and not one that's easily fixed. My experience comes from imported Alias surfaces that are created with tolerances that are much looser than was preferred in NX. There's not a whole lot a user can do when the original "stylist" gives you a bunch of surfaces that contain gaps. There usually comes a point where either the surfaces must change or they need to be recreated as closely as possible. It doesn't help when data has also made round trips through more than one CAD software. I eventually accepted the fact that translators more than likely aren't going to work as advertised with complicated surfacing involved (meaning solid out, solid in) - and that's not necessarily the translator's fault. More often than not, the modeling techniques used led to the issues within the models.

My advice it to learn to get good at recreating surfaces. However, it's usually wise to talk to the orginator of the data first and explain (not complain) what's going on and see if they're willing to help out a little bit to ensure you end up with a quality model that's usable. It might be all for nothing, but it's worth a try. Insinuating that you may have no other choice but to change their math usually gets their attention pretty quickly.

Tim Flater
NX Designer
NX 8.0.3.4
Win7 Pro x64 SP1
Intel Xeon 2.53 GHz 6GB RAM
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2GB

 

[jasonJJ]

Have you tried to use "optimize face" to summons the "force".
I use this tool alot for resurrecting flipped out sheet bodies. If you started with something that was not too bad, it might fix all the little bugs. NX8 tool.
j