Defeature or Shrinkwrap option.

fatguy

Is there a BricsCad equivalent to the "defeature" or "shrink wrap" option found in some other cad systems?

Daniele Piazza

DEFEATURE

As far as I know this feature is missing. In BricsCAD you can easily delete solid "faces" and rely to the ACIS kernel to have the BREP fixed. The hard part is selecting the right faces. You can use the **DMSELECT **command to select:

• holes smaller than x
• fillets smaller than x
• slots/depressions

but the command line options of the command are not really easy to guess. I would recommend a GUI for this command.

SHRINKWRAP

Again, I don't think there is any tool to get the "skin" of the 3D model. The idea here is to remove all "internals", but the concept is tricky to define from a geometric point of view. Furthermore you should take into account materials: I don't think we want the internals of a transparent plexyglass case removed.
Not the same, but one way I found is to select all 3D solids with volume "smaller than...".

ENVELOPE

Another simplification tool is the envelope. The idea is to "wrap" a complex form with a box or cylinder with the minimum volume. Nothing automatic but quite easy to achive with direct modeling.

fatguy

@Daniele Piazza said:
DEFEATURE

As far as I know this feature is missing. In BricsCAD you can easily delete solid "faces" and_ rely to the ACIS kernel to have the BREP fixed. _The hard part is selecting the right faces. You can use the **DMSELECT **command to select:

• holes smaller than x
• fillets smaller than x
• slots/depressions

but the command line options of the command are not really easy to guess. I would recommend a GUI for this command.

SHRINKWRAP

Again, I don't think there is any tool to get the "skin" of the 3D model._ The idea here is to remove all "internals",_ but the concept is tricky to define from a geometric point of view. Furthermore you should take into account materials: I don't think we want the internals of a transparent plexyglass case removed.
Not the same, but one way I found is to select all 3D solids with volume "smaller than...".

ENVELOPE

Another simplification tool is the envelope. The idea is to "wrap" a complex form with a box or cylinder with the minimum volume. Nothing automatic but quite easy to achive with direct modeling.

Thank you for your response. I'm a little embarrassed to say that I really don't understand much of it. I'm assuming you're either a BricsCad engineer, or perhaps an incredibly advanced user. I prefer to make my assemblies as 3d models, and not as mechanical assemblies. I tried doing mechanical assemblies once and it started changing colours which made the assembly almost invisible. Then it started telling me references were missing, etc. It was very frustrating to say the least. So, in regards to your response:
What is ACIS kernel and BREP?

As far as your response to shrinkwrapping, I was able to follow a little better but How do you do what you described? How do you select volumes? etc? Is there a tutorial outlining this?
I really like BicsCad for 2d drawing, but the lack of resources to learn the 3d is very disheartening. Colleagues that use SolidWorks or Inventor have such an easy time with assemblies, making illustrated parts lists, defeaturing etc, and I really struggle. Obviously I'm the weak link in this scenario as I do not know the software. I really want to learn but the resources just don't seem to be there. Honestly, if I knew how little support there was for properly learning to model and do assemblies in BricsCad, I probably would not have made the purchase.