Solids Surface Area

James Cameron

Anyone know how I can extract the surface areas of a 3d solid.

Knut Hohenberg

Total surface area can be retrieved with the 'area' 'entity' command (V12 also lists this in the property window).

The area of individual surfaces that a solid is made of can (as far as I know) only be retrieved by exploding the solid and using the area command on the resulting regions and bodies - at the moment (at least on the linux version that I use), this works only for planar surfaces (regions), curved surfaces (bodies) are ignored.

Ah yes - you probably shouldn't save your drawing after exploding solids, I had bricscad crashing on trying to reopen such a file...

Knut Hohenberg

Oops, I have to correct myself - the term 'bodies' stems from ancient AutoCAD versions and doesn't apply anymore, now surfaces are called surfaces - but they are as 'dead' as they were then...

Jason Bourhill

Hi James,

In Bricscad Pro you could try:

• SECTION. This creates a region based on a cut through your selected solid. You can SECTION on the face of a solid. The created object is a region, LIST or the property bar will give you the area.

• FLATSHOT, or SOLPROF. This creates a 2D projection of your solid based on UCS, or Viewpoint. The profile is generated as a block. You can then use BPOLY to generate a polyline of this, which in turn you can query.

In Bricscad Platinum you could try XEXTRACT. This creates a region of the selected face of the solid.

Note neither of these will work with a curved surface.

Regards,

Jason Bourhill

CAD Concepts

Knut Hohenberg

... and to complete the range of options, you could extract regions with SOLIDEDIT;FACE;COPY (no need for platinum) if you don't want to copy&explode the solid.
Still, the inablility to work with surfaces is a major field of work left for Bricsys... no idea if they want to takle this in the foreseeable future.

James Cameron

Thanks everyone for the follow-up and suggestions.