[New Tool request] : Features Recognizer for imported body (step/igs etc...)

[Piero69]

a good new feature is the ability to recognize features in an imported body (step/iges) so you manage it as freecad model.

The new tool should scan the imported geometry and recognize the producing features with respective sketches

what do you think?

[chrisb]

It would be great to have such a tool, but except for rather simple models (e.g. everything rectangular) it seems near to impossible. I doubt that any of the expensive professional programs has such a tool.

Look at this model ...

Snip macro screenshot-5441e9.png (30.16 KiB) Viewed 2250 times

... and make a guess what sketches this is based on. Even a simpler guess is difficult: What do you think how many sketches were used to create this model?

[JulianStirling]

It is really the sort of thing that is more suited for a PhD project in a MechEng department. Perhaps with the option to put extra meta data in the STEP to aid the process, they would be able to do it for fairly simple shapes. Even if they did, you would still never know what constraints were in the sketches, you would just have the final geometry of the sketch.

I think a very difficult but more achievable goal for CAD in general would be an interchange format that exports the whole design tree. But getting something that works on multiple CAD packages would be very hard, and would require significant buy-in from the big players. But this format would hurt the lock-in business model of the big players, so why would they put effort into this?

[easyw-fc]

a good new feature is the ability to recognize features in an imported body (step/iges) so you manage it as freecad model.

The new tool should scan the imported geometry and recognize the producing features with respective sketches

what do you think?

This is a reverse engineering ... a link to what commercial CADs are doing:
https://www.ansys.com/products/3d-desig ... ngineering

[chrisb]

That's interesting, and I think that could be done in FreeCAD as well; I think Werner has mentioned that he would like to work on such tool - if he finds the time.
Even such an advanced tool doesn't give a (faked) history to the object.

[RatonLaveur]

In a subset of this topic, feature detection would be really good, for example holes their number diameters and lengths, or specific other features or a "find similar features" options.

Commercial online CNC jobshops already have some of those implemented when you upload your step file, they detect and group the holes for facilitating thread tapping if needed, or specific tolerances call outs. This enables the user to only provide a step file and request special operations in a semi-automatic way.

Another example is detection of conical entries to holes in a complex shape, to allow automatic selection for CAM toolpaths of only these features....etc.

[Kunda1]

Reverse Engineering Workbench but it's a bit sparse

[der_fraeser]

It would be great to have such a tool, but except for rather simple models (e.g. everything rectangular) it seems near to impossible. I doubt that any of the expensive professional programs has such a tool.

Actually most Commercial Tools have these capabilitites. SolidWorks has an Feature Recogn. on step Import which detects facets, holes, ...