Exporting features to CAD

[ncsteinb]

I'm trying to reverse engineer some parts using Planes and Cylinders. When I export the data to STEP or IGS, all that I see when I open up my CAD software (SolidWorks and Solid Edge) are the cylinders. None of the planes are coming through.

What do I need to do differently in order to extract a plane from a part, and get some usable geometry in my CAD system? If I just export 3 points for a plane, I miss out on calculating a best fit, right?

Any advise on this would be immensely helpful.

[KIRBSTER269]

When you make a program in PC-DMIS all your doing is creating the mating part, PC-DMIS is nothing like Solidworks it does not create CAD models, Your best bet is making a Pointcloud, Painstaking but efficient. and Yes Cylinders it does make, consider that as a treat because it don't do much of anything else.

[Mike Ruff]

When I have to reverse engineer something, I take all the measurements off the part with PC-DMIS and use the data to draw up the model in SolidWorks. I'm unaware of any way to export actual CAD data out of PC-DMIS

[Matthew D. Hoedeman]

The planes will probably show up as a tiny little triangle. And ANY plane you export from Pcdmis will always be a PERFECT plane. I don't know if it will show up any different after export if you use OUTLINE instead of TRIANGLE for how the plane is displayed in Pcdmis.

[KIRBSTER269]

I believe the planes come out as True Position symbols

[Matthew D. Hoedeman]

in Cadkey (the CAD package I use) they show up as little triangles, about 5mm in size.

[ncsteinb]

So, if I capture 3 points for a plane, that makes a perfect plane. Now, what do I do if I want to capture 20 points, and do a best fit of that data to form a plane? I assume from your responses that I cannot perform the best fit within PCDMIS, and would have to rely on my CAD software tools, correct?

[Schlag]

The few times I did this I just manually took individual points all over the model. I used a point cloud output and then they connected the features the best they could. Depending on what type of cad software you have the level of difficulty varies on the last step.

[KIRBSTER269]

T h i s

[KIRBSTER269]

I found one that I created a while back. This is top notch baby. had to make everything out of Cylinders, Even when I only did radii still produce the whole cylinder, look at those saweet Planes.

Capture.JPG

[ncsteinb]

Sometimes you just have to brute force it huh?