IGES Formatting?

[Anonymous]

Hey Everyone,

We are using Fusion360 to kit bash and design some concepts for our native renderer, Cinema 4d.  Things are going well, we're actually preferring doing a lot of modeling in Fusion, but the issue we're running into is getting the IGES files out of Fusion360.  We are trying to figure out how to conform Fusion to export to the following formats:

(below are the C4D standards based on the IGES importer)

The following geometric entities have been implemented to date:


• Line (IGES entity type No. 110)
• Circular Arc (IGES entity type No. 100)
• Parametric Spline Curve (IGES entity type No.112)
• Rational B-Spline Curve (IGES entity type No. 126)
• Composite Curve (IGES entity type No. 102)
• Tabulated Cylinder (IGES entity type No. 122)
• Parametric Spline Surface (IGES entity type No. 114)
• Rational B-Spline Surface (IGES entity type No. 128)
• Curve on a parametric Surface (IGES entity type No. 142)
• Trimmed Surface (IGES entity type No. 144)

The following non-geometric entities have been implemented to date:

• Transformation Matrix (IGES entity type No.124)
• Color Definition (IGES entity type No. 314)

 

Above is the error we are getting.  

We've gotten the mesh to .stl or .obj process to work, but the geo is a triangulated wreck.  The IGES importer cleans up everything nicely in 3d so we can go directly to UV/Texturing without doing retopo.  

So my question is, is there a way to confine surfaces to the above list the way the file is exported?  

[jakefowler]

Hi @Anonymous,

Many thanks for the question, and sorry for the trouble you're hitting! I'm afraid it's not currently possible to explicitly control the entity types exported to IGES. We're looking into adding more control for data import/export, although admittedly this particular issue isn't something we see all too often (most software can read IGES data from Fusion as it is today).

I'm afraid I don't have access to a copy of Cinema 4D to experiment with, but here are a couple of things I'd suggest:  

• Since Cinema 4D recognises surfaces but not solids, you could try unstitching your entire model before exporting to IGES. To do this, switch to the Patch workspace, open the Unstitch tool from the Modify menu, then window select the entire model and hit OK. This could be slow for a complex model, and you won't be able to do much with the model in Fusion after this, so treat this just as a final pre-process before export. I'm not certain this will work, but this should at least get rid of any 186-type entities from the export.
• From what I can see in the online documentation, Cinema 4D also allows import of DWG and DXF, which Fusion can also export to as high-fidelity geometry. Looking at the details, it looks like their DXF translation might be more robust than DWG, although it's probably worth trying both. And if these don't give you any success, you could try these in conjunction with the Unstitch trick above as well.

Let us know if this does/doesn't work for you, and if not we'll try to figure out the best way to get this translation pipeline working for you.

Thanks,

Jake

[innovatenate]

Great questions, I went digging through the API (see sample below), to see if there were any options exposed in the API for the local translator. I did not see much beyond the ability to select what geometry to export and what to name the file.

http://help.autodesk.com/view/NINVFUS/ENU/?guid=GUID-d1462fe6-fd43-11e4-b6b4-f8b156d7cd97

I didn't see anything listed there that would allow you to change the entity type for a given geometric entity. However, there is an objectType property that appears to return a read-only value for the type of the object. I'm not familiar enough with the API (sadly) to determine if this would help you in any way, I just wanted to mention it in case it is helpful.

http://help.autodesk.com/view/NINVFUS/ENU/?guid=GUID-18ed3a0d-8665-4965-8aa1-920b506da0bb

I also note that there are two sets of IGES translators (although they should produce the same results). The local IGES translator is available from the export command in the file drop down menu.

There is another cloud translator if you export from the A360 Dashboard.

I would expect the results to be the same for both, but it may be worth a try.

Hope that helps!