Polygon File

[cstauffe]

I am trying to work with NX 6 and/or 8 using the .ply(polygon file) export, but I cannot seem to do anything with it as the header is not correct. I cannot seem to find any documentation on the .ply file type and NX. Any help would be wonderful. I've tried opening in Geomagics and MeshLab, both give the invalid header type for .ply format.

 

[JohnRBaker]

From what I can find, the polygon file format exported by NX is a proprietary format used by the 3rd party NC tool-path verification program called Vericut, which is devloped and sold by CGTech Inc.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

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

 

[cstauffe]

I just found that out myself. We used Vericut at one point, its a pity, because the .ply export gives much cleaner triangles then the .stl, due to the fact that you can set the size limit. I wish stl export had the same option.

 

[JohnRBaker]

But then the .stl format was originally defined by 3D Systems Inc, back in the late 1980's and was later adopted as the defacto standard for the rapid prototyping industry in general. Unfortunately we had no say in the establishment of the 'standard' used in formatting the .stl file.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

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