B. Ludin

Tom - I just posted a similar request in another thread before reading this one. Actually, I would just love to have the possibility to rate IC's ER list. But in addition, I would also like to have my own ER list as part of my member profile which I can maintain and edit and which every other member of the forum and, more importantly, IC's decision makers could review, too. My priorities may change as my way of working with the product and the product itself are developing. Having my own editable list in the forum would let me keep it updated easily while giving the IC staff a valuable resource for making decision. What do you think? Beat

I've used it (the Win version, that is) quite a lot before switching to ModelPress (which only exists for Windows). Works very well with VRML2 exported ffrom IC. Beat

Thanks, Cary. That's works, although the concept is not quite as userfriendly as it could be, to put it mildly - take that as an ER

I've just started using symbols/groups from 2D catalogs. I can't figure out how to change to rotate the groups in the drawing. Can anybody help me out? TIA, Beat

Random facetting could be difficult. But a quick way to get a facetted shape is the following switch on facet shading - set the scene rendering to facet shading (that's just to see what you're doing) - create some kind of rounded shape using whatever tools you like - adjust the rendering surface smoothness of the part until you get the display faceting you like - export part as STL (this will use the same surface smoothness setting) - re-import the part with smoothing switched off - voila! Cheers, Beat

Neat1 BTW, "Harn" is German for urine...

IronPRO has this functionality. Anyway, I've always thought that this should be naturally built into IC itself and have filed an ER a long time ago. Im glad to see that this is coming up again. Beat

OK, conceptually, this would be easy to overcome, simply be having templates (symbols, master parts, whatever you like to call them) which all linked instances refer to (kind of like saving the externally linked file internally). But from your comment I conclude that this paradigm is not (yet) implemented in IC, although your usage of the term "parent file" would point in that direction. Cheers, Beat

I just wondered: Why can't we have internally link parts which reside on different hierarchy (assembly) levels? It does work with externally linked parts, so I can't see why it shouldn't work with internally linked ones, too. Beat

OK, I'll enter this as an ER then. Beat

Is there a way to show in the BOM file properties (name, path, creation date, etc.) of the file the part/assembly resides in? Beat

Sorry, Tom. I didn't mean to put you down. No offense intended. Just couldn't resist. You know, just the old story of a mere sphere trying to compensate feelings of inferiority by ridiculizing a bold circle... Cheers, Beat

Yes, having several columns of tabs instead of having to scroll would be a good idea, in the meantime: Hint1: Use shorter names for the catalogs, that way, more tabs will fit on the screen. Hint2: Get an IBM T221 WQUXGA (yuk) monitor. That will also help a bit. Cheers, Beat

Hey, welcome to the illuminati

...and to answer your second question: unfortunately there's currently no way to constrain the length of a 3D curve (AFAIK, at least). Beat

No, both the DELL and the OKI are laser printers and, as I said, none of these can printer borderless (to the best of my knowledge). That's a point in favor of inkjets. Minimum margins on the Dell are 4.1mm on each side. I don't know about the Oki. Beat

We just got a DELL 5100cn (single-pass with duplex and network) for around $2000 (in Switzerland) with 4 years next-day-on-site warranty. As far as I can tell at this point, everything Rob told about the Oki holds true for the Dell, too. One nice thing about the Dell is the low price of the black toner, which means that the printing cost is quite low if you do mostly b&w and have only moderate amount of color output (like we do). We found that it's not worth to start with a inexpensive printer and then upgrade it with additional features you need (e.g. duplex). Usually you get a higher-class printer which has these features as standard for a comparable or only slightly higher price and you get the advantage of a faster and heavier-duty printing engine. Beat PS: Two things to consider, since brochures is what you want to print: if you want photo quality, no color laser touches a good inkjet. And quite a few of the photo-quality inkjets can print borderless (no laser can AFAIK).

Steven - I didn't mean to criticize. I just wanted to point out that Modelpress is on the same level as IC-Viewer. Modelpress has very nice security features, IC-Viewer has much faster rendering (on my setup, at least). The combination of these two, maybe spruced up with 3D-Tool's ability to produce small executables (i.e. the recipient doesn't have to install anything), would make up my (almost) perfect viewer. Beat

I don't think, ModelPress really has native ICS support. It seems to make use of the embedded HSF stream just like the IC-Viewer. Beat

And I always thought that was a bug ...

Still, being able to modify the postion and orientation of UV-mesh nodes would be a great enhancement to the surfacing capabilities of IC. I predict that this alone would make IC much more attractive to industrial designers. Beat

Yes, coomands for generating a copy or a linked copy would be very handy. (I think this has been proposed previously). This would be complementing triball-based copying and many respects. Beat

Great tip, Tom. Would you happen to know is similar trick for batch reordering of shapes within a part? (I guess, switching off auto-regen might work, but it's a bit tedious having to go to the options dialog each time to toggle the setting.) Beat

Can somebody tell me how the 3D horizontal and vertical measuring tools work in IC7 (Pu1)? Up to IC6, they used to work in a pretty logical fashion, i.e. horizontal and vertical would simply be defined by the camera view. This has changed in IC7 and I can't figure out the logic behind the new behaviour . Can somebody enlighten me? Beat

I've ended up solving the problem by installing an evaluation copy of Rhino , which opened the file w/o problems using about 350MB of RAM only. I then exported to ACIS and Parasolid. IC couldn't handle the Parasolid but did fine with ACIS (with the usual occurrence of bad entities). Originally, the out-of-memory error occured at a page file size of about 2GB according to TaskManager (although the limit was set to 5GB). If that's cumulative with the 1GB RAM that I have, this would nicely fit the 3GB limit, wouldn't it? I'll give it a try when I get to it. I'd rather not give out the original file if I don't have to because we promised to keep it confidential. Beat