I moseyed on over to Autodesk Labs today to see if they had any goodies to try out. For the uninitiated, Labs is the place where Autodesk places new technologies previews in order to get feedback from the public.
When I got there I switched over to the Inventor section to see if there was anything new since the last time I visited…..and indeed there were several new technology trials, as well as a few plug-ins. I’ll check them all out eventually and post the details here, but for now, a few words on the Mesh Enabler for Inventor technology preview.
As I said in a earlier post Rhino Import Translator for Autodesk Inventor, this importer is likely to solve some headaches in companies that are transitioning to Inventor, but still have a seat or two of some gosh-awful expensive old-school swoopy surface software. Converting files can be a huge headache, and if the one guy who can do it seems to be away from work more than at work, it can truly be a nightmare (been there).
Which is where Inventor comes to the rescue. Inventor now has more import formats than you can shake a stick at. The addition of the Rhino importer was a big one for me as I was working with ship hulls that were created in Rhino and Rhino Marine by the Naval Architects, but I’m sure there are tons of folks out there that need to convert Catia files. Remember, there is no guarantee that this experimental software will ever see the light of day outside of Labs, but I would bet my bottom dollar it will part of Inventor as soon as the wrinkles are ironed out. that’s the MO at least.
Which brings up an interesting fact. There are stand-alone convertors and conversion services out there that cost a hell of a lot more than a seat of Inventor (especially Inventor Lt which is about a fifth of the price of the full-blown Inventor Suites). Check out the comparison of file import capabilities in the image below that compares the screen capture from my January 2010 post to one I just captured today…
There are five additions……all for Catia file formats. The first four are for CatiaV4, and this new, experimental one, adds (maybe) another file format to Catia V5 category. That’s 43 total if you count the three .dwg’s –a hell of a lot of conversion power if you ask me!
Enough jabber, on with the testing. The Labs site has two versions of the convertor that can be downloaded, one for Inventor 2011 and one for 2012. I downloaded and installed the 831kb 2012 version in less than two minutes.
As with most (all?) convertors in Inventor, you need to get the open file dialog, set the ‘Files of type’ to whatever it is you want to convert, select the file from the list, then either click Open, or Options…
You really should go to go to the options to see if the default settings are what you need. In this case, there didn’t appear to be any changes needed in the options, so I went ahead and opened the Pedal.cgr part at the default settings…
Which gave me the above Inventor MeshFeature in ipt. format. To convert the mesh to a solid you need to right click the MeshFeature1 and choose Convert to Base Feature…
Which brings up the following options. As you can see, I chose the solid body and to delete the original…
…and a few seconds later, I got this…
..which is very tessellated by Inventor standards. I’m guessing the original was modeled in the context of an entire bike as well because the origin planes are a tad caddywhompus…
I guess the tessellated solids are as accurate as the original parts, but I couldn’t do anything with the imported MeshFeature1 so I can’t say so for sure. They certainly don’t look very good.
Also of note, turning on Ray Tracing made the MeshFeature1 disappear completely until you hovered your mouse over where it’s ghost was hiding…
Lastly I took the solid part into Fusion to see what could be done there, but I got zilch. None of the tools worked….. at least all of those I tried. I admit I left there pretty quick because I’m not very fond of Fusion. You see…..when using a 3D mouse in Fusion, there is a horrible jerky movement when rotating. If that weren’t enough, they threw in an incredibly annoying green pivot center that I guess is supposed to help noobs adapt to the added dimension…..but in the real-world the experience is akin to operating a 3D Etch-a-Sketch after being zapped in the eyes with a green laser pointer. So I left.
Back on the Inventor side, it is nice to be able to have some form representation where there would otherwise be none, but it would seem to me some more work needs to be done on this convertor. It is an experimental software, so who knows what the final version (if there is a final version) will be like. The 2012 version expires in a little over a year, so there’s plenty of time for improvement…. or to decide to just junk it. Hopefully they fix Fusion during that time as well.
I would love to hear from those who work with polygon surfaces on a daily basis and hear what they think. Maybe I’m just spoiled with the look of native Inventor parts.
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