stock models

Yea I know this place is a ghost town but I thought I would post a few musings on the stock models so I can remember it.

I got $10 that says nobody posts a detailed answer here. ;)

I am using 2017 still in Inventor 2018.

This use scenario is, you are machining a complicated shape of many job steps and several different coordinate system frames from all sides of the part. Sometime later you want to rework the original part to make it leaner. So you make modifications to the part in Inventor that only takes metal away form the part. And you want to now machine these modifications in Hypermill. And because they are complicated, you want to do full verification in Hyperview (an amazing piece of code by the way).

So far so good, easy peasy.

Were do you get your stock model? Hmm. . .

1) first way is to go back to the original hypermill job lists and get everything to simulate in hyperview (chaining from one frame to the next) and use it to output VIS models. This is the prefered way because is actually will work in subsequent hypermill job steps and subsequent hyperview simulations. But this is no easy task because each frame has to be simulated separately and fed into the next frame's job list from hyperview output. it can take hours or days of work. Also some of the machining that was done on the part was never performed in hypermill in the first place so just to simulate it you have to build a bunch of hypermill jobs that were never created. One might comment that the accuracy of this method is marginal but I find it is sufficient.

2) the alternate way to get a stock model is to simply use inventor to build it and use hypermill to create it using surfaces. Wow, this is so easy and quick. But when you do this it creates an STL file that you use to make into your stock model and they appear to have limited functionality. When you view their icon in the stock model list it is not green on top, but rather white. And though you can use it in arbitrary stock roughing job steps, you can not use it in the joblist def or in hyperview. So, your are not able to create the Hyperview verifications you need or to chain through other simulations. Why is this? Is it because VIS files work and STL files do not? Why not make an STL to VIS file converter? Sure would make this process cleaner. Or is there some way to do this?


Cheers
SF

Open mind folk were watching like a hawk and called me with the answer. Thanks Ernie.

There is a button that heals the surface selection to make it water tight. I never saw it. Once you push it, it no longer saves the file as an STL file but rather saves it as a VIS file. And of course that works perfectly in hyperview. There is also a automatic feature now that calculates the stock model for you. I look forward to playing with it.

Hyperview is wonderful but there is also an internal simulation that is almost identical. I will be checking it out too.


Cheers
SF