I am trying to open the STEP file within this Open Compute archive http://files.opencompute.org/oc/public. ... 7&download which is a Rackspace server. My Macbook is annoucing me 20h to read the file. So I will wait for the process to end up (I am not running out of memory , so no swap)
Some ProE info from the export
Pro/ENGINEER INTERFACE EXPORT LOG FILE
STEP output for 装配 00_SERVER-TLA_25OU-BARRELEYE.
Option values used for this export.
step_export_format AP203_IS
export_3d_force_default_naming NO
intf3d_out_extend_surface YES
intf3d_out_surface_deviation DEFAULT
intf_out_as_bezier NO
intf3d_out_force_surf_normals NO
intf_out_max_bspl_degree 16
I know that STEP import is coming from OCCT probably and we can't do anything, but we might perhaps help it to go faster as 20h is quite long to read a file which has been created in 2 minutes
Have you perhaps linked to the wrong file? Your link downloads a huge zip file containing all sorts of things including a BIOS and PDF files etc. I did find a stp file in a sub directory which when unzipped was also 199.9MB and I tried importing it in a very old FreeCAD 0.14 and after a few minutes I gave up.
Have you perhaps linked to the wrong file? Your link downloads a huge zip file containing all sorts of things including a BIOS and PDF files etc. I did find a stp file in a sub directory which when unzipped was also 199.9MB and I tried importing it in a very old FreeCAD 0.14 and after a few minutes I gave up.
The step you found is the right one it is in ME directory
Sorry for the archive it is huge I know and does contains all the design file from the project. I didn't found yet an easy way to post it somewhere (I am using a roaming data connexion currently). So reading the file takes long time because it is big, but I think we might be able to improve this time, or it is a good exercise to try to open it.
I am not fully up to date, but this is the current version I am using on my Mac.
OS: Mac OS X
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.17.7990 (Git)
Build type: Unknown
Branch: master
Hash: da70ba1642d28668bbe470030a85ca88d4a2d157
Python version: 2.7.11
Qt version: 4.8.7
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 7.0.0
CADExchanger which is also based on OCC claims to load it in a bit more than 10 minutes. When I tried it I could already see parts of the model but it was still loading. After around 15 minutes I had to kill the application because memory usage went up to 4.5 GB.
EDIT: The actual reading of the file is very fast and only takes around 30s. The slow part is the transfer from STEP entities to OCC entities. I wonder if there is a way to do this multi-threaded.
wmayer wrote:EDIT: The actual reading of the file is very fast and only takes around 30s. The slow part is the transfer from STEP entities to OCC entities. I wonder if there is a way to do this multi-threaded.
Since CADExchanger 3.2 there is a v2 of the step importer that uses multi-threading. It needs to be turned on in settings. For me there is a large performance increase since v1.
wmayer wrote:EDIT: The actual reading of the file is very fast and only takes around 30s. The slow part is the transfer from STEP entities to OCC entities. I wonder if there is a way to do this multi-threaded.
Since CADExchanger 3.2 there is a v2 of the step importer that uses multi-threading. It needs to be turned on in settings. For me there is a large performance increase since v1.
Hi sgrogan, might be great if we could integrate that feature . I didn't even know CADExchanger, but importing STEP is a "standard" behavior in mechanical field and seeing some improvement there might be really good. The good news is that I saved the file in native FreeCAD format and then after reading it is far far much faster (5 minutes instead of 1hour)
wmayer wrote:EDIT: The actual reading of the file is very fast and only takes around 30s. The slow part is the transfer from STEP entities to OCC entities. I wonder if there is a way to do this multi-threaded.
Since CADExchanger 3.2 there is a v2 of the step importer that uses multi-threading. It needs to be turned on in settings. For me there is a large performance increase since v1.
Hi sgrogan, might be great if we could integrate that feature . I didn't even know CADExchanger, but importing STEP is a "standard" behavior in mechanical field and seeing some improvement there might be really good. The good news is that I saved the file in native FreeCAD format and then after reading it is far far much faster (5 minutes instead of 1hour)
in windows DesignSparks Mechanical is much faster in loading STEP files... it would be great if it would be possible to increase loading speed also for FreeCAD!!!
Maurice
CADExchanger is a proprietary software but they provide evaluation copies with a 180 day time frame. No production use is permitted by the evaluation license, but as wmayer pointed out the app is based on OCC. Their main (or one of the main developers) is active in the OCCT forums for a long time. I guess the point of my post is it's at least possible to multi-thread step import using OCC and that it works well. From the timing I think OCC >6.9 is required. http://cadexchanger.com/download/CHANGES.txt
, so no swap)
