Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate

[Anonymous]

Hi,

New to the forum here.  Are there any compatibility issues with Visual Studio Ultimate 2013?  

Also, does anybody have an explanation of how to take a certain face and extract it's geometry?  I have been going through the object browser, and I can see several face related objects and functions.  Could one of the moderators give an example of how I could log or view the geometry from a particular face that is selected on a part?

[ekinsb]

You can use Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate to write add-ins for Inventor.  All of the versions of VS can be used with the exception of the Express versions and with some extra effort even they can be used.

The geometry of a Face can be examined in a couple of ways.  First the Face object has a Geometry property that will return different types of objects depending on the shape of the face.  For example, it can return a Plane, Cylinder, BSplineSurface, etc.  You can use this returned object to understand the shape of the face.  In addition to the Geomtry property, the Face also supports the Evaluator property which returns a SurfaceEvaluator object.  You can use this to perform various queries on the Face.  For example, to get the range, normals, tangents, etc.

An important thing to understand is that the geometry returned is not bounded.  The boundaries of the face are defined by its edges.

[Anonymous]

Hello and Good Day My Friend!

I sincerely appreciate the response.  I am attempting to write a CAM add-in for Inventor (foolishly maybe because it will very likely never be better than HSMWorks) but I am mostly just curious to try.  I can see from using HSMWorks that extracting the boundaries of a relevant face is the key to starting a toolpath. 

There is very little information on CAM creation.  I am of the belief that mostly toolpaths are an exercise in two specific areas, aside from code.  I believe the first discipline is calculus, specifically vector calculus, and the second is cartesian algebra.  I think with a combination of those two elements, and also knowing how to format GCODE for various manufacturers, again a tremendous task, I think it's possible.  That being said, it's not going to be easy, but i'm just experimenting...

Anyway, back the the faces and boundaries.  When you say they are not bounded, can you clarify?  I understand that HSMWorks can cut toolpaths basically once the face is selected!  Inventor gives you the ability to select the seperate faces on a part, and I assume that would be the starting point for a toolpath.  

Does anyone here know how to communicate with the selected face as to invoke a toolpath.  That might seem like a lengthy question, but lets just say for the sake of simplicity, we will leave out the shape of the tool etc.

I am really just grasping at stars here. 🙂