Is there any way to aut-detect a part's sheet metal thickness.

[m___o_p]

My problem is like this. Im getting a bunch of step files and they are all of sheet metal parts and i want to make a flatpattern of each one of them, but they don't all have the same thickness. Is there any way to detect the thickness then changes and applies it in the defaults. This would save me a lot of time. Maybe a nice iLogic rule? Please help me out.

[hkilic896XF]

Hi.

I have a single click complete solution for hacking step files, codes are in VBA and there are two ivb files for this purpose 11166 kbyte and 12068 kbyte.. it means more than iLogic, many thousands lines of code.

The way is; for each part get planar surfaces with biggest area, and check parallelism between them and get min distance between them. With a complex algorithm that will work for most situation, this will give you the thickness in a long way, but shorter ways for some specific parts may also be written.

[m___o_p]

great, where can i find it?

[hkilic896XF]

You must work on it I think. Or may be someone will send some codes for you. You may write to programming forum. I just tried to explain the method, the way I use.

[A.Acheson · Accepted solution]

Ho @m___o_p 

Here is a sample and at least a step in the right direction. If you can at least detect if there is a difference between the thickness and the sheetmetalthickness by code then you can at least flag what ones need changing. Trying to automate the whole process might be more complex. Have the post moved over to the ilogic programming forum and try your best to see what is your main requirement and request help with that. Post the code your trying to use and people will help with missing functionality.

[m___o_p]

Thanks, very helpful