Display Interactive Models Solidworks Composer or 3D PDF

Ignition
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My company uses Solidworks for our CAD modeling and as a new project we are switching from plain PDF drawings to 3D interactive Solidworks Composer models as our visual reference. Is there a way to either embed the free Solidworks Composer Player tool into an ignition window or (this is probably the more reasonable solution) open a 3D PDF or HTML export of the composer file in an ignition window?

Any help or development leads would be greatly appreciated!

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I just came out of a meeting with our Manufacturing Engineers.

They are looking for best practices on how to view 3D Composer files within Ignition.

The software currently exports to PDF(with 3D extension) and HTML (but requires activeX to function) and it would be a great boon if we should show/display these files alongside our internal Ignition Applications.

Has there been any progress on this side of Ignition?

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Anything based on an ActiveX isn’t going to work. You’d have to wait for some sort of Java alternative support from the supplier of that ActiveX. ( Don’t hold your breath. )
However, if the format is a published standard, there’s some hope of convincing someone to take a stab at a JavaFx-based renderer. A gorgeous geo-modeling application was an ICC award winner a couple years ago.

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I like the description of “the gorgeous application” :slight_smile:

I can help & give directions on how to manage this to work.
Basically as soon as you would have a list of edges & vertex it is not very hard to get something running in 3d inside an ignition window. Even with hardware acceleration :slight_smile:

But a proprietary format will be difficult. There is a need in all cases to come down to a list of X/Y/Z coordinates and polygons to fill.

2 Likes
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I’m also very interested in this. :+1:

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Also very interested! .:+1::+1:
We use the WRL file format which is exported from Solidworks. Would be nice to represent our robot model dynamically on the screen!

cheers!
vds

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The WRL files from Solidworks are VRML, a publicly-available specification…

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The web brower module supports WebGL on some platforms. There are several javascript libraries the will load and display different 3d files.