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?Tips for complex import?

?Tips for complex import?

?Tips for complex import?

(OP)
I'm importing a Diesel's valvegear support casting from a step file.  It has lots of fillets and intersecting fillets and such.

Most of the geometry comes in okay, but there are 116 'Faulty faces' and 4088 'Gaps between faces' to repair.
So far, "Attempt to Heal All" has caused the computer to 'go off to see God', several times.  For this run, I've closed every other file that was open, and have already removed nearly every other program from the computer... but I'm expecting to keep seeing that damn hourglass for quite a while.

When/if SW comes back to report partial success, how do you suggest I go about manually repairing, e.g. 'fill patch'... and how do I keep track of what's been done and what remains to be done?

I.e., 'Import Diagnostics' occurs in a sketch, but the Insert Surface patching is done in 'model space', if you will, and the first patch makes the diagnostics report inaccessible.

Or am I doing it wrong, again?

 

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

RE: ?Tips for complex import?

Instead of trying to 'heal all', do the faces first. I've run into similar issues importing large pieces of equipment. Through trial and error (read: dumb luck), I found that fixing the faces first often took care of the gaps, or at least most of them.  

Jeff Mirisola, CSWP, Certified DriveWorks AE
CAD Administrator, Ultimate Survival Technologies
My Blog

RE: ?Tips for complex import?

(OP)
Thanks.  I'll try that tomorrow, if SW has redrawn the screen in the morning...

 

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

RE: ?Tips for complex import?

Sometimes it helps to turn off auto-repair and also to not try to knit the model during import.  For some reason, post-import healing sometimes does a better job of healing and knitting than the import process can do.

RE: ?Tips for complex import?

Can you attach the original file (step or iges or whatever it is) here for others to experiment with?

RE: ?Tips for complex import?

(OP)
The file is not mine to send.

The step file is 12Mb.
It comprises a couple of nested assemblies.
The major, core, part, the one I'm trying to deal with, is 32+Mb as a .sldprt file, hollow with surfaces, 116 of which are 'faulty'.


The flaws seem to be little tiny things like 3-way fillet intersections that 'fill surface' can patch, and breaks in straight-ish fillets with radius mismatches.  I think I could repair all of them manually, if I could remember where they are through the repair process.  Most of them are too small to notice even when they're highlighted.

SW didn't, technically, crash while attempting to deal with the file automatically.  When I left, it was not refreshing the screen, at all, but otherwise appeared to be working.  Some time during the night, it stopped, redrew the screen, and put up a dialog box saying it could acquire no more memory.  Then it offered me a choice of allowing it to close, or to go around behind it and shut off everything else (done last night) and ask it to retry.  I let it terminate, and rebooted.  

Then I opened just the innermost part, none of the assemblies, and asked SW to just repair the faces.  It's not redrawing the screen at all; I guess that's normal.  I'd prefer to see a progress bar or some other cartoon suggesting that it really hasn't crashed.


Oh.  System specifics:  
SW2009.0.0.  
Dell Precision 690, 2 cores,
Nvidia Quadro FX 4500, 2 monitors.
System ram reported variously as 3Gb or 4Gb.  
WinXPPro.
Yesterday running with /3G and /userva=2940 switches.  
This morning running with just /3G.

 

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

RE: ?Tips for complex import?

I agree with the progress bar statement, Mike. More often than not, I'd have task manager open just to be sure SolidWorks was still running.
I've also used the geometry to create new sketches and just replicated the part rather than trying to fix all the errors.
 

Jeff Mirisola, CSWP, Certified DriveWorks AE
CAD Administrator, Ultimate Survival Technologies
My Blog

RE: ?Tips for complex import?

(OP)
{ Make that /userva=2900. }

This is a part you wouldn't want to recreate.

The vast majority of the 4006 surfaces come in just fine; it's just the number of fiddly bits that aren't quite perfect (and probably aren't perfect in the original model or in the iron casting) that's aggravating me.

 

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

RE: ?Tips for complex import?

(OP)
So, eventually, I just went down the feature tree, deleted each surface with an import error, and inserted a fill surface.  I only had to do it 20 times, and all the errors went away.

Thanks for all the help, everyone.

 

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

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