Granite/Pack
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PTC Granite importer licenses: ACIS® SAT (up to v7), IGES (solids), Parasolid®, ProE® native parts & assemblies, Pro/DESKTOP®, STEP & VDA-FS. Also includes Okino surface-based IGES importer as a complement to the solids-based PTC IGES importer.
The Granite suite of CAD importers is one of Okino's all time most popular solutions for our CAD customers. We will openly state that our implementation of PTC Granite works wonderfully and as such it has become very popular with our customer base. Many years ago we passed our internal collection of CAD files (over a decade and a half worth) through Granite and made sure all minor problems of the Granite technology were solved. To date we rarely, if ever, hear of problems with any of the CAD importers in Granite. Okino does not blindly sell CAD converters to customers, but rather we give our own personal recommendations on which technology we have found to be the best and most robust -- PTC Granite gets 'two thumbs up' from us.
Okino has actively integrated the PTC Granite interoperability kernel directly into its PolyTrans & NuGraf packages to provide extensive "3D solids" CAD model import support to its already extensive line up of 3D CAD and non-CAD file formats. This core technology adds the strong native file import support for ACIS® SAT®, IGES (from solids), PTC Pro/Desktop®, PTC Pro/ENGINEER®, Parasolid®, STEP and VDA-FS. It is licensed and sold as the optional "Granite/Pack" add-on license. These formats play a pivotal role in bridging the CAD and industrial design markets with the non-CAD worlds of 3D multi-media animation packages, VisSim packages, WEB publishing and polygonal modelers via the tried-and-tested Okino data translation pipelines offered in the PolyTrans & NuGraf packages.
The importers also offer another means to transfer Pro/ENGINEER data into Okino's NuGraf rendering package which Okino has optimized for Pro/ENGINEER users since 1996. When combined with Okino's CAD data optimization routines (for hierarchy & part count simplification), very complex assemblies can be imported, optimized, simplified, then re-exported to packages such as 3ds max (via native plug-ins in max), Alias Maya (via native plug-ins in Maya/NT), Lightwave, SoftImage|3D and |XSI, OpenFlight/Creator, Renderman RIB, trueSpace and many others.
Granite/Pack Features
1. Adds a wealth of complementary 3D-solids-based file formats (ACIS® SAT®, IGES, Parasolid®, Pro/Desktop®, Pro/ENGINEER®, STEP and VDA-FS), at a reasonable price, to the already extensive list of Okino supported CAD file formats.
2. Import all of the Granite file formats directly into 3ds max (via PolyTrans-for-MAX) or Maya (via PolyTrans-for-Maya) via native plug-in versions of PolyTrans, or use the stand-alone PolyTrans/NuGraf software to re-export the Granite-imported data to all major 3D file formats in an optimized state.
3. A highly developed and continually maintained importer by Okino. In addition, Okino has tested the Granite converters with a large number of CAD data from the Okino 3D model repository and has used this data to help PTC refine all of their import converters.
4. Imports and retains: assembly hierarchy information, assembly names, BREP structure of the source model (bodies and faces), various material parameters, model units and units matching, and various attributes (hidden status).
5. The quality of the model (the number of polygons) can be controlled via surface deviation, curve deviation and normal (angle) deviation controls.
6. Direct access to PTC Granite model processing functionality: (i) Apply data healing algorithms, (ii) Close open boundaries and, (iii) Simplify surfaces.
7. Okino's "CAD Scene and Hierarchy Optimization System" has been integrated right into the Granite importer. This is most important when importing large CAD models into 3DS MAX, Maya or Lightwave. These animation packages tend to have performance problems when the source CAD model is large, and/or has a large number of individual parts (which is often the case with the BREP model topology of data provided by the Granite importers).
8. A good number of options that can be (optionally) set prior to import, to control most situations that could be encountered with Granite data import.
9. Complete control over material parameter modification on an automatic basis. Many CAD systems have basic material parameters (like color, ambient + diffuse shading coefficients, opacity, etc) but when they are transferred over to a rendering and animation system they often look "too bright" or "highly ambient". This can be expected and is quite normal. The material tweak parameters easily allow such saturated shading values to be automatically compensated.
10. Importing via a "solids-based" file format ensures that adjacent NURBS patches are "stitched" together via topology information (BREP data) and thus creates "crack free" tessellation when the NURBS or parametric solids are converted to a polygonal mesh.
11. Yet another method to move data from Pro/ENGINEER into Okino software. Okino has long supported and sold to Pro/ENGINEER users, with interoperability provided by SLP and IGES files, and now via native Pro/ENGINEER files. NOTE: Data imported via native Pro/ENGINEER files will come in as polygons while data imported via Okino's IGES importer will come in either as pure trimmed NURBS or tessellated polygon meshes.
12. Granite's modeling code uses the exact same geometry libraries as Pro/ENGINEER, the most robust solid modeler in the world. Accordingly, over 300,000 engineers use applications built on Granite today, and Granite has been used to design every variety of manufactured product.
13. Complete support for importing PTC WildFire part and assembly accelerator files (.xpr and .xas).
