Microscribe and SolidWorks

First of all we do not have the budget for Revworks. Reverse
engineering is not our business. The Microscribe arm came with MUS
software which doesn't help a lot. I need to digitize very organic
shapes and make solid models in SW. I MUST NOT BE ALONE HERE. Has
anyone got a macro or some shareware that would take XYZ input from the
MUS software, or from an Excel file and generate contours which I could
then loft in SW? Another approach might be to create a bunch of guide
curves to sweep with. Anything similar?

Thanks much.

 

You might check at http://imsrv.com/ and
http://www.cadcamcadcam.com/hobby

HTH

 

I hope this will help, anthough, strictly speaking, it is off-topic.

Quite a few years ago when I was in lightning studies at University of
Toronto, we wanted to model return strokes (the easily seen lightning
that strikes clouds, earth-based objects or and sometimes anything
in-between). We had a camera for XZ and a camera for YZ. We also had an
XY camera, but the image was necessarly distorted and unusable without
considerable signal conditioning --that we did not want to do). (Civil
engineering details abbridged), one of our researchers (Ding On Yuen)
made a programme (in Fortran) that combined these two to yield an XYZ
(field-delimited file) output. Later we hacked together something
similiar with Mathematica (on SGI reality machines). I can look for the
code (but doubt I have it anymore); but I cannot believe that we were
the only team to make this sort of algorhythm. So, you should be able
to find plenty. This worked quite well for us (lightning path
modeling).

 

Thanks MHill.

Good idea with the tape. That'll make it easier for sure. For my
purposes I need the contours horizontal and parallel, so I'm using a
laser level which is really helpful too.

MUS is just Microscribe Utility Software. doesn't do anything too
fancy, but lets you set up coordinate systems, parallel planes, etc..
It's NO help getting data into SW in any useful way.

Where, on the web, might I find these macros you mention? That's the
kind of thing I'm looking for.

Ben

 

Has anyone got a macro or some shareware that would take XYZ

I searched a bit for that kind of software myself, but didn't find
any. My memory is vague here about what I ended up doing... I know I
just used AutoCAD to generate 3-D polylines, but I can't recall if I
successfully imported those into Solidworks. Another alternative is to
just generate points. You can edit the output of the MUS software to
type "point" before each coordinate.

If you don't have AutoCAD, the DWG Editor that comes with SW should
be able to accept the MUS input.

Joe Dunfee