Sewing And Smoothing Hundreds Of NIGHTMARISH Sheet Bodies (see jpeg)

[Marlborough]

Is there a tool within UG that can rapidly sew and smoothen a whole bunch of small poor quality sheets. Perhaps even 3rd party software that can process these IGES sheets and transfer them back into UG. The one in the jpeg is actually a smaller example composed of about 210 sheets. Some of the nasty ones are 25 times larger containing over 4000 smaller sheets. Trying to avoid having to recreate every face.

 

[SiW979]

Doesn't the quilt function do something along these lines? just a shot in the dark as I'm not that cluded up on surfaces.

Best regards

Simon (NX4.0.4.2 MP4 - TCEng 9.1.3.6.c)

http://www.jcb.com

Life shouldn't be measured by the number of breaths you take, but rather how many times it's taken away...

 

[JohnRBaker]

Have you looked at...

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

...?

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
NX Design
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

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

 

[Xwheelguy]

Marlborough,

I haven't tried John's suggestion before, so don't count it out.

Quilt is about the only alternative that I can think of to use in this situation. You will need to frame up all the surfaces that you wish to join into a single surface by extracting the edges (try to keep them 4 sided). Then Quilt will create an approximated surface within the specified tolerances. Based on the image you provided, this appears that it will be time consuming.

Tim Flater
Senior Designer
Enkei America, Inc.

http://www.enkei.com

Some people are like slinkies....they don't really have a purpose, but they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down the stairs.

 

[hudson888]

That looks nasty. Where did you get it from and what do you want to use it for? What tolerance deviating from the original might you be prepared to accept?

The natural assumption is that you want a first class model. This may not be true depending on your needs.

The model has the appearance of facets perhaps the output of some scanning software. On the other hand the sheets appear that they may meet at corner apexes rather than edges that are blended with some radius and that being unusual would not normally result from a scan.

Coming back to those edges; if you want to apply blends later on then you're also going too struggle just because of the design of what appear to be corners with some nasty vertices that will be difficult to resolve with any straightforward sequence or combination of blends.

I can foresee several problems related to what I have described above, and for that reason I hope you'll respond to the first couple of questions without revealing too much, because I can't really advise you very well without more information.

You may succeed with a quilt surface to achieve a rough facsimile of the original. This technique appears to break up the original into a cloud of points on a grid if you like and then attempts to build a new single surface through that. It does as such want to work to a roughly rectangular patch of data and struggles with three and five sided shapes. It also seeks to apply some continuity over the entire working area to the internal sharp corners won't necessarily be accurately duplicated.

If you want to learn about using quilt surfaces as part of your surface re-building technique start small. A too tight tolerance over a larger area will take too long to process and may cause many machines to hang. Personally I have rarely had any major success with using it, and by the look of your image it would not represent a "one size fits all" solution, but might help with rebuilding some of the sheets into single slabs.

The sheets to solid assistant appears to simply sew and thicken your data. It appears to be convenient on occasion, but for this complex geometry I think you may wish to create the model in two separate steps with some opportunity for checking in between. What sews properly may not necessarily thicken, and nor am I certain you need to do so based on your initial post.

At first glance it looks like you probably have a lot of work to rebuild these models almost from scratch. If you're able to shed some light on the requirement we may be able to point you toward something less drastic.

Best Regards

Hudson