Hi all,
I am having some problems with a very simple task. I simply need to take a model (no textures, armatures, or modifiers. just geometry) made in blender and import it into Inventor. I have tried every possible export format possible with blender and sketchup 8 pro. Nothing seems to work. I have had some formats that will come in as just wireframe, and another that comes in as a flat 2-D object, but these are not useful.
Can anybody help?
So you are aware of what i tried, below are the formats that sketchup 8 pro can export as:
Hey, gun. Former Inventor user and current CATIA user here… no, getting geometry from Blender into a solid modeling app isn’t a cake walk, as you’ve discovered. In fact, in over a decade of blender use, I’ve never accomplished the (direct) transfer in any usable way. The closest I got was getting a “blob” of geometry into SolidWorks one time with VRML, but once in, that app could do little more than display it - and it didn’t even do that properly. Its likely that the closest you’ll come is via the STL format, but how Inventor handles the import is not certain.
If you can handle a little bit of quality loss, you might try HeeksCAD, into which I’ve imported blender-genned STL before, and which can export to IGES or STEP, either of which are much more CAD friendly formats. HeeksCAD uses OpenCASCADE for this, and is OSS (just google it.)
The fundamental issue that you’re facing is the completly different kind of geometrical data that blender utilizes from the average parametric CAD app. In reality, blender’s is only mesh data - 3D points (vertices) connected by edges and faces. Modern 3D CAD apps combine several types of geometric definition in order to arrive at fulley enclosed volumes (solids) of geometry. They typically must keep this solid geometry distinctly defined within their data structures from other kinds of geometry data, such as surfaces or 2D entities. Thus, when you import only 3D mesh data, they are not always readily equipped to deal with it - requiring that it be “sewn” together and fully enclosed before it can be defined as a “solid” entity, which they then can handle with ease.
STL, by design, is intended to bridge this gap for CNC and RP applications - in one direction, at least (out of the CAD app). Heaven bless the wonderful coder who took the time to write the STL translation for blender. Its been a godsend indeed!
Thanks for the info mzungu. We found a workaround with software we already have. I dont think we have it down to a science yet so i may come back for some more help. Thanks for explaining why it is not so simple though. its good to know.
Cheers.