A simple optimization would be to not perform the ray-firing technique on solids that we know are handled well by the explode approach (although that may require the use of COM to get the solid type, if memory serves me correctly). It should be said that none of these collection operations have been optimized for performance – this is mostly about getting lots of points to help generate an enclosing sphere, later on. And that’s once again in addition to any curves or faces extracted from the solid as it’s exploded. It’s not a guaranteed way to get points defining the solid, but with a couple of thousand points being generated by a thousand intersection operations, it should be representative enough.

I took some F# code from this previous post as a basis, to fire rays in random directions from the centroid of the solid and pick up the points at which the objects intersect. There may be a more straightforward way, but this appears to work, at least.įor Solid3ds it was a little more complex. In addition to any enclosing curves that get processed as the Surface is exploded, of course. To get more information from Surface objects was reasonably easy: the code creates NURBS surfaces from the surface and processes each of these by getting points inside the u and v parameter space. The same is true of SubDMesh objects and even – to some degree – surfaces (although for these we are likely to only get the defining curves, rather than points along the surface itself). The good news is that the previous approach of exploding complex entities and processing their components means that many types of standard solid – such as boxes, cones and pyramids – will get adequately captured using this approach, as they have faces that comfortably get decomposed down to primitive objects that are handled by the existing code. I don’t know whether it’s exhaustive or not – I’ve added more specific support for Solid3d and Surface objects – but I have no doubt people will let me know if I’ve missed anything, over time.

After revealing the purpose for collecting points from 2D geometry in the last post, this post extends the 2D collection code to work with additional 3D objects.

Autocad 3d