TrueGrid Imports CAD/CAM and Solids Models

TrueGrid^® Imports CAD/CAM and Solids Models

Complete models are faithfully imported from your favorite CAD/CAM or Solids Modeler, ready to use. TrueGrid^® imports trimmed surfaces and other geometry, in the standard IGES format, from solids modelers and CAD/CAM systems without complications. The model to the left was built using a commercial CAD system and imported into TrueGrid^® as 24 surfaces.

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The following IGES entities are supported by TrueGrid^®:

3D CURVES	SURFACES	OTHERS
Lines	Planes	Transformations
Circular Arcs	Ruled Surfaces	Levels
Conic Arcs	Surface of Revolution	Associativity
Parametric Spline	Tabulated Cylinder	Subfigure
NURBS Curve	Parametric Spline
Composite Curves	NURBS Surface
	Trimmed Surface

With TrueGrid^®, you can avoid the tedious and wasteful effort of chopping trimmed surfaces into simple patches, meshing each patch, and then stitching the meshes together. Instead, you easily combine many trimmed surfaces into one surface within TrueGrid^® by simply identifying them.

Every CAD System and Solids
Modeler has a tolerance when the
surfaces are written to an IGES
file. This can cause the surfaces to
overlap a little or create a gap
between the surfaces. Any good
mesh generator reading such an
IGES file must deal with these
inaccuracies.
When these surfaces are combined
into one surface within
TrueGrid^®, the gap is not noticed.
The projection of the mesh onto
the combined surface will simply
project to one side or the other of
the gap. The overlapping of the
two surfaces is ignored.

When TrueGrid^® automatically
intersects surfaces, if the surfaces
do not quite meet, the surfaces will
be automatically extended
tangentially so that they form an
intersection. On the left are two
surfaces which nearly intersect.
The upper face of a shell part is
projected to the green surface
shown above. The lower face of
the shell part is projected onto the
blue surface shown above. The
edge in common with the two
faces is automatically placed along
the intersection of the two surfaces
as the surfaces are extended
tangentially. This translates into
less effort on your part, since you
do not have to clean-up the IGES
geometry before you can use it.