Which Versions of ACIS / SAT are supported by acisin and acisout?

Stephan Bartl

Currently I am working with Autocad 2011. There it says that it can import ACIS / SAT up to version 7.0.
Now I would like to know what versions Bricscad supports. In the online help documentation I could not find any information as to the supported versions of ACIS / SAT.

Kind regards, Stephan

Richard Webb

Some information is in the release notes (not necessarily the most intuitive place to look).

Specifically referencing ACAD in/out, from 13.1.10 "COMPATIBILITY: ACIS data more recent than version 7.0 cannot be handled by AutoCAD. In order to allow drawings to be opened by AutoCAD, BricsCAD now converts ACIS data created by higher ACIS versions down to version 7.0."

There's a related system variable ACISOUTVER that defaults to 70. It's a free-text field so the actual legal range of values is not specified.

Sakko

using the command ACISOUT to export a BOX and looking into the files (they are ASCII files...)
you get the following information

Bricscad 12.2.18

700 0 1 0
@33 Open Design Alliance ACIS Builder @12 ACIS 22.0 NT @24 Mon Jul 15 17:20:41 2013
1 9.9999999999999995e-007 1e-010
body $-1 -1 $-1 $1 $-1 $-1 #
lump $-1 -1 $-1 $-1 $2 $0 #

Bricscad 13.2.9.1

700 0 1 0
@33 Open Design Alliance ACIS Builder @14 ACIS 23.0.2 NT @24 Mon Jul 15 17:18:53 2013
1 9.9999999999999995e-007 1e-010
body $-1 -1 $-1 $1 $-1 $-1 #
lump $-1 -1 $-1 $-1 $2 $0 #
shell $-1 -1 $-1 $-1 $-1 $3 $-1

Richard Webb

It's an interesting question - an opportunity to learn new stuff.

I did find this extract. The "700" in the SAT files seems to be the version number of the file format. The string "ACIS 22.0 NT" would be the version of the ACIS engine that produced the file, so the engine version and the file version seem to be separable.

Just for fun, I fired up CAD Exchanger, which converts between various 3D formats. It has options for ACIS export versions up through version 20. Importing a 1x1x1 cube from Bricscad 13 and then exporting it as ACIS format version 20 yielded:

2000 0 1 0
42 CAD Exchanger 2.4.1 (www.cadexchanger.com) 8 ACIS 7.0 24 Mon Jul 15 14:15:36 2013
1 1e-007 1e-012
-0 body $-1 -1 -1 $-1 $1 $-1 $-1 F #
-1 lump $-1 -1 -1 $-1 $-1 $2 $0 F #
-2 shell $-1 -1 -1 $-1 $-1 $-1 $6 $-1 $1 F #
-3 face $-1 -1 -1 $-1 $8 $14 $2 $-1 $71 reversed single F #
-4 face $-1 -1 -1 $-1 $-1 $12 $2 $-1 $76 reversed single F #
and so on.

Bricscad successfully imported CAD Exchanger's ACIS file versions up through 9.0. The higher numbered versions resulted in "ERROR: Failed to load the file." Since 7.0 seems to be the de facto ACIS file interchange standard for the time being, I'd guess that we're okay.