Delete inside geometry

[pramod91]

Hello, im a newbie to the cad world. I use Maya as the main program and i
was given an stp file to use as the foundation to render out a image.
The file i have has all the internal parts, and overlapping geometries laid on
top of each other and is highly detailed. All i need is the outer shell because
thats all that is going to be rendered. I dont own Pro Engineer or Auto Cad .
Maya supports import of stp files but there are no option to clean up the file.
Can you guys suggest any techniques to just get the outer shell and delete
all the inside pieces. The scene is so heavy that i can barely orbit around in
maya.
Thanks

 

[tobbo]

in pro/E you can do a shrinkwrap. That will only give you the outside geometry.


//Tobias

 

[pramod91]

if only it was that easy, i have to spend weeks cleaning up this file. I dont
have proEngineer so is there any other way?
thanks for the suggestion.

 

[dakeb1]

Post the stp file here and maybe someone who has time will do a
shrinkwrap for you.

 

[pramod91]

thanks for the offer, i'll ask the client if its ok to do so.
quick question before i dig too deep into the conversion process.
Currently all the surfaces are nurbs. Does shrink wrap convert them to Poly
surfaces maintaining the shape perfectly?
Also would i get quad output for the polys?
If shrink wrap cannot export the geometry with the overall shapes intact its
not much use to me.
Thanks

 

[dakeb1]

I'm on my holidays now perhaps someone else could help?

 

[Kevin De Smet]

Pro/ENGINEER natively uses nurbs and other mathematically defined forms (plane, cone, sphere)

Maybe you could try a convert to polys in Maya and then re-topologize it in another tool (like Topogun) to get a nice quad mesh that's easy to unwrap and texture. Or just leave it a triangular mess, if it's for still rendering, that should be fine. Don't know how the vertex normals are handled for smoothing, though.

 

[pramod91]

thanks for the suggestion. The end output is not a still render but a
turntable with reflections and textures. A triangulated mesh sometimes gives
us issues with reflections.
Does shrink wrap at-least replicate the shape of the outer shell accurately?