SolidMesh with CAPRI Options
CAPRI CAE Gateway, licensed from
CADNexus,
provides SolidMesh the ability to import native solid model or shell data
from various CAD vendors. Through CAPRI, SolidMesh has the ability to
read STEP and native CAD models from parametric CAD systems
(Pro/Engineer,
UniGraphics (NX),
SolidWorks,
Catia V5 R11 (or higher)) and geometry kernels
(OpenCASCADE and
Parasolid).
Each volume in the model will be assigned to a group. The assigned name will
be used if provided.
SolidMesh can manage the CAPRI imported surfaces and mesh them internally like any other surface.
The geometry imported from CAPRI can be modified, but cannot be exported as a geometric model to a CAD system or saved as trimmed surfaces to an IGES or STEP file.
The surface can be retrimmed to correct sheet or STEP data.
The original trimmed entity can be deleted from the SolidMesh database (it will not be removed from the original CAD model) and will be replaced by the
underyling NURBS surface geometry.
The NURBS surface can then be retrimmed from the surrounding curves.
The NURBS surface will need to be deleted to remove the geometry completely
from the SolidMesh data base.
Surfaces can also be constructed from the imported curves.
These will need to be glued after construction.
The original CAD file needs to be present even though the data is saved to a
save state
file. The CAD data will be reloaded through CAPRI. Only the tag
information, topology, and mesh information associated with CAPRI imported
data is saved to the save state file.
SolidMesh is currently linked with CAPRI version 3.08. Licenses and libraries
for CAPRI should be obtained from CADNexus. CAPRI is currently
available for the Linux-x86, Sun, and SGI versions of SolidMesh. The MacOSX version
will be made available as soon as possible.
Environment variables:
CAPRIkey = license provided by CADNexus. Machine and software dependent.
CAPRI_INST = installation directory of CAPRI.
CAPRIshell = Set to "On" to read shell data; otherwise only solid models will be read.
CAPRI_BIN = location of Step2BRep.exe (converts STEP to OpenCASCADE BRep).
CASROOT = path of OpenCASCADE directory.
PARASOLID = path of Parasolid directory.
The presence of CASROOT and PARASOLID environment variables are for local versions. If these are present, the CAPRI calls do not go to the CAPRIserver.
LD_LIBRARY_PATH = $CAPRI_INST/lib:$CASROOT/lib:$PARASOLID/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
The lib directories are set up appropriately.
The tessellation will affect the accuracy of the surface mesh. The parametric curve representation is extracted
from the provided tessellation. Parametric Curve representations do not exist through the CAPRI API.
Parameters affecting the tesselation are specified in the File I/O window or using
command line options -capriangle, -caprimaxlen, and
-caprideviate.
