[brlcad-news] Updated BRL-CAD export plugin for Pro/E

[brlcad <br...@ma...>]

A new version of BRL-CAD's geometry converter plugin for Pro/ENGINEER is now available for download [1].  The ProE-BRL plugin is a production exporter that has been developed over the years as a means of importing geometry into BRL-CAD from Pro/ENGINEER.  This update of the plugin for the Windows platform supports Wildfire 4 (64-bit), Wildfire 5 (64-bit), and Creo (32-bit and 64-bit).  The plugin will work on other platforms, but will have to be compiled from a source distribution.  This binary release is once again being provided with the hopes that it will be useful and should fix problems loading the plugin on Vista.

The way the converter works, it asks Pro/ENGINEER to convert geometry from their internal boundary representation format into a facetized polygonal format, which is then imported into BRL-CAD as a collection of Bag o' Triangles (BoT) geometry.  Needless to say, that process can (and does) fail within Pro/E before even getting to BRL-CAD, so the ProE-BRL plugin attempts to coerce a conversion.  It iteratively adjusts tolerances (down to specified minimums) until geometry is processed successfully and provides various options for reporting when conversion to polygonal mesh fails.  While that method of import is rather suboptimal [2], it's often a convenient method of importing models into BRL-CAD if you work extensively with Pro/ENGINEER.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/brlcad/files/BRL-CAD%20External%20Plugins/
[2] See our new "step-g" STEP importer for a better way.