Joel Parrish

This works OK so long as that dimension is not a threaded hole. Example - 0.236 to M6 or 0.190 to #10 -JP

Hi all, I have one assembly with nearly 500 parts in it. While it takes a while to load, I have never had a problem with my machine running out of memory. I am running XP Pro on an AMD Chip with 1 Gig of RAM. While there are some obvious hardware differences, I feel that the problem could be in the OS. While RAM is cheap, I'd like to point out that all versions of XP and 2000 are not initially optimized for more than 512 Meg of RAM. TweakXP, WINner Tweak, and many tweak programs out there that address this issue and other resource and memory issues. Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Chris, I'm running IC 6 now, and am still having face display problems when sweeping along 3D Curves with the Parasolid Kernel. Will this be addressed in the next release? Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

I've been annoyed by the lack of coverage of IC in these magazines for atleast a year. So I just sent the editors of Cadalyst Mag this letter. I suggest everyone who reads this to send something similar. We the users need to tell the editors of these magazines that we want to see their opinions of IC in print. If IC is to get the recognition it so deserves. Editors, I've been receiving your magazine for a number of years. I have enjoyed the articles on Inventor, SolidWorks, SolidEdge, & Pro-E. However, I feel that you are neglecting one of the better MCAD packages out there, IronCAD. I have used all of the packages mentioned here, and prefer IronCAD to any of them. IronCAD is faster, more versatile and gets me to the end product quicker than any of the aforementioned MCAD packages. IronCAD 7 will be released this spring, and I would like to see how you stack it up against the other MCAD packages of which you have so diligently concentrated your reviews and opinions. Thank you, Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

I recently saw this happen. My default surface smoothness was mysteriously changed from 30 to 300. It took me about 30 minutes to find what had slowed my scene rotation down. Just before this happened I had download a 3D model from Mcmaster and imported it into the scene. I guess that could have changed it. Anyway check your surface smoothness under Tools - Options - Parts (right side Graphics and faceting) Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

I've seen this with small parts in large scenes.... Easy way to reproduce this is to take a part from a catalog and make a copy 2000" away... copy both of those 2000" in the other direction... so you have 4 corners of a square, so to speak... then drop a new part in and resize it to say 1/4" x 1/4" x 1/4" ... zoom all the way in on the small part, move the camera closer so the part is nearly full screen, target the part... select it and initiate the triball... rotate the scene... you'll get what we've been calling "the triball chu chu" effect... Seems to be a triball update problem with a "large scene" and a small part zoomed all the way in on a part and moving the camera closer than the default "fit scene" distance... However, turning the perspective off drasticly limits the effect... Does that make sense? Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Just to give you Intel guys something to chew on... Doing these tests for fun... Copy Test 1 to 2 sec Chris's regen facet_test. 18 sec AMD 2500+ Barton 1 Gig of 400Mhz DDR 7200 UATA-100 GeForce 4 Ti4800 8x AGP 128 Meg Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

I agree with Tom here. This actually feels like a huge step backward. I'm so used to being able to right click the extrusion and seeing what the length is and changing it accordingly. Now I have to bendover backwards to findout what the extrusion length is and at times do a calculation to change it accordingly. I often find myself in a hurry and don't go thru the whole extrusion menu process. And the extrusion defaults to 50mm or 1.968504 in english. If I right click on the handle, I get 0... if I wanted it 0.25 inches. I have to plug 0.25 - 1.968504 into the dialog box. Or hunt thru the Intelleshape properties dialog box and change it there. Actually I recently started to avoid the extrusion tool all together. Now, if it I am removing material I drag a H-shape from the from the catalog and edit the cross-section. Saves me a little frustration. Just watch it if you edit the cross-section of a solid intelleshape. You pull a side handle and it all goes out of wack! -JP Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

I recently had a customer visit to make some changes on a machine we are designing & building for them. The customer currently uses uptodate versions SolidWorks and Pro-E. And he had never heard of IC. I am certain that he was under the same "watered-down" impression. He was taken aback at how quickly I could make the changes he requested. I remember quotes like "you can't do that in..." & "doing that in ... takes forever" & "now I see why you said this is faster to model with than ... " I ended up spending an extra hour or so showing him different features and functionality of IC. I think I sold him on trying the demo. I think part of the 'watered-down' problem is name recognition. AutoDesk, SolidWorks, Pro-E all have the dollars to shove advertisements infront of potential customers. The next problem is, I havn't seen a recent review of IC in Cadence or Cadalyst in a long time. Anyone know a ghost writer? Or does anyone have the time to write a review and submit somewhere that would print or post it for other CAD users to see? There was some talk about IC advertising with Rhino. But I hav'nt seen any yet. Another thing, I havn't been to a trade show in a year or so. But I don't recall anyone displaying IC next to SolidWorks, SolidEdge, Inventor, Pro-E since it was a part of VDS. Basically what I am getting at is IC has all the functionality that the over blown CAD guys have. The speed of modeling complex assemblies is what keeps me with IC. (If I modeled the same part everyday with slight variations, I might use one of the others that is more 'strict' parametricly.) Let's all start a campaign "Take the IC challenge!!!" Challenge Inventor, SolidWorks, SolidEdge, Pro-E, users to download and try IC for the 30 days. Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Ahh, nice one... I've been looking for a way of holding this window size for a dual monitor setup... Keeping the catalogs on one monitor and the scene on the other... Now if I could move the scene browser to the right hand side of the scene, I'd be stoked... Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Alt + Print Scrn will copy the current selected window. Print Scrn will copy the whole screen. Then open something like Paint or PhotoChop and paste it in there. Save out as jpg, gif, bmp what ever suits your fancy and away you go. Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

My animations have been exported with a solid background... The trouble I've been having with exporting smaller AVIs is that after the first couple frames all the part edges pixellate... The frames look like someone over compressed a jpeg... My framerate is 30 frames/sec (I could trim this back)... And I'd prefer the view size to be over 1024 x 768 (1280 x 1068 is prefered)... I've tried a couple AVI to MPG programs to try and shrink it down. Either they choke, or export a file worse than if I were to drop the DPI export in IC... The trouble I had with the PNG output method was the number of files I had... I had 3.5+ gig of images (5700 frames)... I tried to combine using Image Ready... Image Ready choked with a not enough memory error... I suppose I could have done small sections... And combined later... I have done small animations in the past to help show a customer how their machine is going to perform a specific function... Pretty small animations not needing the best quality, just to show the concept... However, this case is an assembly line proposal, lots of motion, camera angle changes.... It is a large job & I'd like to wow the potential customer... I guess the conclusion I am coming to is that IC has had the functionality to create animations for years, in fact if I remember correctly trisprectives had a couple things it could do... I've seen some advances in what can be done with the animations... I frankly don't use animations often, so I do not want to detract from the continuing advances in the mechanical & usability aspects of IC... But I'd hope that someone will look into how to export a better quality animation from IC, without having to play trial and error for days at a time... Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Chris, We finally got a decent animation out of IC... 500 dpi, same size as screen (1209 x 850), Cinepak, highest quality, 24 bit. Yeilding file is 780 meg & 3 minutes and 10 seconds... -JP Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Chris, what's your FTP info? The IC files are 18meg zipped little too big for my email upload... Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

I've been able to make some minor camera changes thru the animation that will suffice... If you note my posting "Exporting Animations", I've found that windows movie maker does some strange things with tranlucent parts in an AVI... I'm going to try Adobe Premier hopefully over the weekend, I will report results... Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Chris, I'd love to email you the AVI but a full export is about 780meg... I've found that if I stop it part way thru it's resolution is much worse... mpawlak, I've tried all the compressor types... It's interesting, sometimes the Cinepak works well at about 500 dpi... And sometimes the Video1 works better at 300dpi but creates a file size 3x the Cinepak @ 500dpi... It seems to really depend on the background color and the number of visible motions on the screen as to which works better... And yet another interesting thing to note is that some of the parts I have in the scene are translucent... and if I bring the AVI into windows movie maker and export it to try and compress it some to it will fit onto CD... The translucent parts are covered with a large pattern checkerboarded... Nothing to do with IC, I realize, but interesting none the less... One nice thing about bringning it into windows movie maker, is that it splits the movie up whenever the camera angle changes... I have Adobe premiere at home I might have to give that a shot... I'm still having spurratic luck in getting what I consider a quality animation out of IC... So I'm considering using a video screen capture program to try and get something of higher output quality... Over a week has already been spent on setting up the animation alone... I wonder if I shouldn't have just modeled here and then brought the models into Maya for the animation... Maya would have probably choked tho... Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Chris, The PNG style is working. I just have 5700 frames of animation. It's going to be a long day. Good thing I have lots of disk space. The AVI exact screen size trick didn't help. I'm still getting blurred and choppy frames after the first frame. Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Is there a way to zoom in with a camera in the animation process? or Is there a way to switch to a different camera to acheive the same effect? Joel Parrish Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

One quick question: How can you export a high quality AVI animation from IRONCAD? Every setting I have made results in the same blurring of parts and edges after the first frame. Is it the included codecs that are available in IC? An animated GIF gives me the best resolution, but using it results in poor playback framerate. I suppose I could use a screen capture program. But it would be nice if I could simply export a high quality AVI. Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Rick, I've always found the fastener tool to be way too slow... you got to pull down these menus... make selections, make sure that they are correct... So that's why I use the catologs... It saves alot of time.. just drag and drop from the catalog... I've found that many of the fasteners and nuts are not standard sizes. So I've had to make my own, and when I do I dump them in a catalog for future use. One for instance is the 1/2" threads on any of the screws or holes, defaults to 1/2-12... which if you aren't conscious of it will really throw the machine shop for a loop... So if IC would please release where these settings are or open up that part of the code to where one of us can change these default sizes to reflect actual standard sizes. So we can share those with other users... Or if they could go thru and make sure that everything reflects standard sizes, give more screw size options, and distribute that. I know of atleast 2 users that would greatly appreciate it... Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Attached to this message is a zip of an AVI of how I can make it happen. What I didn't show in the video was quite interesting as well. This time the original scene file with the 3 externally linked parts changed to refer to the "Block w hole.ics" as well as the drawing. Not the first time I've seen this, but worth noting that it doesn't happen all the time. I hope this file upload works, looks kinda sketchy to me.... Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com link problem.zip link problem.zip

Cary, You said "As for the problems describe above, we are not yet clear how the source changed on its own. So if any one can see a reproducible case or experiences this, please let support know" I can make it happen every time! It's very easy... make an assembly of 2 or 3 different parts... I did a cylinder, a Block & an Elipse... I made a drawing with sheets for reach... then with the drawing still open I goto file and open, opened the part that was the Block, ( you can do it by right click and edit scene too ) Then save the part out as something else... and put a hole in it... update the drawing and it has changed the model it was referenced to... but not the original scene with the 3 parts on it... If that is of any confusion, I'll make you guys a video... Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

cpariseau, the drawings are sheets 1 & 2 of a drawing file. As of now, the issue has been resolved. However not as cleanly as first hoped. First, I'd like to compliment the IC support crew for their quick and attentive response to this issue. What we had to do was use control-shift-L to relink the original file with the drawing file. And since the Water Jet drawing wasn't as detailed, we simply deleted the Water Jet drawing and created a new sheet with that part on it. I take it that this doesn't happen very often, that a drawing file is open and linked to a model and then the model is saved out as something else. B/c if it was more common, then there would probably be an easier work around or atleast one that is less counter-productive. Thanks again Chris & Cary. Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Cary, I don't think that you are getting what Dave is saying. Actually I created the drawings that Dave is having trouble with. What I did was, I created a model ie an assembly (no configurations, b/c there is no need for any configurations, BTW configurations don't work as well as they should I've wasted many hours just trying to use them)... Then I extracted the single part files and made drawings of them each on their own separate page... One in particular was "Part.ics"... Then I realized that I forgot to make a model that was over sized for the Water Jet to cut out... So I took "Part.ics" and saved it out as "Part - WJ.ics" and made a new sheet and detailed that part... Well, when Dave had made a change to the original part (Part.ics) and went to update it in the drawing it was no longer linked to "Part.ics", but rather "Part - WJ.ics"... So I had 2 sheets that were associated with "Part - WJ.ics"... All b/c I had the drawing open and saved out the original "Part.ics" as "Part - WJ.ics" Does that make sense? Or did I confuse the issue even more? Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com

Another thought that might make the 3D curve more useful, would be to be able to project edges to a 3D curve... I can kinda do it now, but as easily as if I could use the project 3D geometry tool... Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com