Mon, 06/13/2005 - 11:52
Hello !
I am currently evaluating different cad kernels to use in our FE application. The first thing we need is to get IGES and/or STEP geometry into our software. Is Open Cascade IGES and STEP interfaces ok ? Does anyone have any experience ?
We need to extract the geometry as line segments and triangles to use in our visualization engine (OpenInventor as in Coin3D http://www.coin3d.org) Is that easy to do ?
Do you know of anyone that has ported OpenCascade to HP-UX 11 and
SGI IRIX 6.x ?
Is it easy to locate subsets of the huge codebase in Open Cascade
to port only the things needed to read file, extract tesselation data, and be able to keep a reference from the visulaiation to the topology of the shape ?
Well, any thoughts on any of this is most welcome.
If we feel comfortable with OC we would consider using it for more tasks, so basically are you all happy with OpenCascade, or do you regret starting to use it ?
Any iny thoughts are appreciated. :-)
Regards,
Jacob
Tue, 06/14/2005 - 21:10
I am using OC with OpenInventor (TGS/Mercury) succesfully. The original approach was to apply a mesh to the shape, triangulate each face and create an SoIndexedFaceSet comprising triangles. This worked succesfully.
Later we moved the triangulation into OpenInventor, you define an SoShapeHint with a faceType of SoShapeHints::UNKNOWN_FACE_TYPE and a windingType of SoShapeHints::ODD_TYPE so that holes can be rendered. Then all you need do is set up an SoIndexedFaceSet by exploring the topology of the OC shape.
In general OC works pretty well - certainly considering you basically get it for free. It is a little slow and sometimes the boolean operations fail but in general most problems can be worked around.
Fri, 11/22/2013 - 15:42
Hi Gerard,
Can you tell me how i can render .stl and .iges on same environment in coin3D?? Whether i should use SoNurbs or SoIndexedFaceset or any other is there??
It would be really helpful if you can show me a function how they have implemented SoIndexedFaceset.
Thanks & Regards
Anup S
Fri, 06/17/2005 - 16:52
Hello Jacob,
- the STEP and IGES interface work well
- you should have not problem extracting the geometry as line segments and triangles from the topological shape, they are tools for computing triangulation base on some tolerance value.
- I know Open Cascade used to work on SGI IRIX (we used it back in version 3.0, but not anymore).
- It's quite easy to just used some part of the library, if you look at the documentation you should see it's divided into several different DLL, so you could just port/compile what you need.
- You might even consider using Open Cascade for visualization.
We are happy with Open Cascade and the fact we have access to the source code, it makes it easy to integrate with other package for us, like Qt from Trolltech.
Hope this help,
Francois.
Fri, 11/22/2013 - 15:43
Hi Francois,
Can you tell me how i can render .stl and .iges on same environment in coin3D?? Whether i should use SoNurbs or SoIndexedFaceset or any other is there??
It would be really helpful if you can show me a function how they have implemented SoIndexedFaceset.
Thanks & Regards
Anup S
Fri, 11/22/2013 - 17:41
Hello Jacob,
I am also a happy user of OCCT.
One thought on IGES/STEP (especially IGES). Bear in mind that the quality of imported models is bound to the quality/precision of the input files. I would try to find representative models and see how they import into MFC samples to see the results and problems (missing faces etc.)
Pawel