Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] STL to IGES conversion

On Mon, 01 Apr 2002 19:36:39 -0000, you wrote:

>|I don't know anything about IGES. Most recently I've been using STL.
>|Accutran and Rhino both can do STL to IGES conversions. I'm trying to
>|understand what this conversion does and what the result looks like.
>|Does it maintain the surface informations or is it just a bunch of
>|splines. I once tried without much success to convert a curvy STL
>|surface model to IGES. When I read it back into Rhino I couldn't make
>|sense of the output but may have just done something wrong. This has
>|become an issue as I understand Bobcad 18 does its 5-axis surface
>|machining from IGES models.
>|
>|Any thoughts or experience? Is anyone doing this kind of conversion
>|already?
>|
>| Roger

Hi Roger,
One thing I have seen from using Rhino is that there are several
flavors of IGES. Each is a little different in what and how the
drawing entities are saved to the IGES drawing file. You may have to
expeiment a little bit to find one that saves the entities you want
and in a way that BobCAD likes.

I have been passing IGES files back and forth with a Catia operator
for some years now with no problems. Mostly nurb surfaces, wireframe,
and lines, circles, etc. I select something like MasterCAM or SurfCAM
flavor because both of those programs handle the entity types we are
interested in preserving.

I haven't worked with STL so don't have direct experience with it.

Monte