When it comes to developing aerodynamic surfaces, a bit of stitching is always required. That's where CADdoctor comes in.
However, outside help can lead to all types of technical difficulties, including scenarios where teams working on the same project end up using incompatible CAD systems.
What’s a CAD manager to do in that scenario?
Elysium’s CADdoctor for Data Translation
While it’s true that most CAD systems have started to ease up on their insistence that non-native file formats are verboten, not every file format works with every CAD system. In cases where a CAD mismatch occurs, it’s important to have a dedicated CAD translation package that will ensure any file can be used by any designer, any time. That’s where CADdoctor comes in.
Elysium, Inc.’s CADdoctor is, first and foremost, a CAD data translator. The ability to translate nearly every CAD format makes CADdoctor the design world’s Rosetta Stone. But beyond making a simple translation of one file format to another, CADdoctor validates the geometry within a file to make sure nothing is lost or mistranslated. If validation errors do occur, CADdoctor gives users visual feedback about where an error has occurred and how it can be best fixed. If possible, CADdoctor will give the user an automatic healing solution, but when that option is not available, the software provides designers with numerous tools to amend any funky geometry.
Point Cloud Healing
Building on its ability to heal damaged geometry, CADdoctor is also able to heal point cloud data generated by 3D scanners. Once a point cloud file has been imported into CADdoctor, the software can automatically create a polygon surface from the millions of points scattered within a file. If further geometric manipulation is required, de-noising, smoothing and point removal tools are at the user’s disposal.
Removing features can speed up simulation times.
But rather than setting a designer up with a dumb CAD model, CADdoctor can do a design team one better by segmenting the component’s geometry and healing any errors that might remain in the model.
Features—More and Less
Aside from being a multi-CAD translator and reverse engineering tool, CADdoctor is also capable of performing other complex operations like feature detection and removal for engineers building FEM models or mold designs. In its feature detection package, CADdoctor gives users the ability to automatically detect features like fillets, holes, bosses, ribs and steps and have them removed from the model. This type of geometric simplification can shave millions of computing cycles off a demanding FEM simulation, saving engineers both time and money.