Recent content by robertf

Been using Alibre for a long long time. Occasionally I will have a part that gets made by tube bending. In the past I thought I had done the centerline as a 3D sketch and swept the tube profile over it, making it very easy to measure length between bend starts and overall length of material...

Does this allow custom post processors? I've got a few machines that don't use traditional g-code.

The other CAD packages I've used export only features on the plane. It might be nice to be able to export the transformed profiles that are visible from that plane. An option to place origin at the centroid and adjust angle or snap an axis to a line would be a big time saver too. Regarding...

Yes Nate. I'm familiar with the work flow, I just miss it as a standard automated feature that preserves profile origin like many of the other CAD packages I use.

I will second Pete's request. selecting a face and exporting it to dxf is a big time saver, especially if its a non orthogonal plane.

Lew, the idea behind the 242 format is to get away from supplemental documents and include everything in the step file. Its relatively new, but the time savings look very promising. Here is a MBD file shown using NIST's STEP analyzer

Is there a way to retain the annotations when exporting to the new STEP 242 format? If not, are there any plans to implement it?

its not necessarily going to cam software, but since every mill part I do has 0 in the center, and every part I model has 0 in the center that would be a nice bonus. This is one of the few basic features that solidworks blows alibre out of the water on, exporting 2d shapes. It seems silly to...

Let's say I want the part origin to be at drawing 0,0. How would that be done?

I have always guessed the zero point in the drawing and transformed the exported DXF/DWG in whatever downstream program I'm using. This is inconvenient and time consuming. is there a way to exact place a part in the drawing creation mode?

Thanks for the suggestion I looked at the reference manual and I do not see any functions that add a part to an existing assembly.

Is anyone actively developing add ons with the current version of visual studio and geomagic? I'd like to throw together a quick macro to insert files based on an eagle parts list, x,y,z,rotation file and a corresponding model lookup file, but couldn't find anything on the geomagic web site...

Is there a quick way to move an existing sketch from one plane to another?

Fusion 360 does offer a Mac version in addition to the MS version that seems to work just as well. Usually non MS based mech eng software really sucks.

I've been very slowly transitioning to fusion 360 for 100% new projects. I see solidworks thrown around here a lot. I use SW and GMD every day. SW is old, buggy ,and bloated. If you have no legacy part models and arent using a specific plug in, it's a terrible choice to switch to.