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How can Reconsprite help with your conversion needs?

• Limitations of 2D drawings
• The solution: Move to 3D
• Problems in moving to 3D
• The solution: Reconsprite

Limitations of 2D drawings

2D engineering drawings have been a part of the design and manufacturing industry for more than a century now. While 2D drawings still play an important part in the product development process they have various limitations some of which are:

• The manufacturers ability to improve their products' time to market is curtailed.
• 2D drawings do not help manufacturers design better products cheaper and faster in an ever increasing competitive environment.
• Analysis of tolerances and fits is not possible with 2D drawings.
• 2D Assembly drawings are almost always cumbersome to draft, interpret and maintain.

The solution: Move to 3D

Most problems that manufacturers face with 2D drawings can be overcome with the use of 3D models. This is the reason why the use of 2D drawings has been superceded by 3D models and 3D solid modelers. While 2D drawings will never completely disappear from the scene (at least not in the near future), the process of creating 3D models and generating the associative 2D drawing from the 3D model is easier to implement and maintain. Solid modeling has been around for more than a decade and there are multiple CAD systems to cater to the various needs of the 3D modeler (e.g. PTC's Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks, Autodesk's Inventor, UGS' Solid Edge etc...). Some advantages of using 3D models:

• Improved time to market.
• Ease of maintenance of design data (parts, assemblies, drawings).
• Improved interference, tolerance and dimension analysis.
• Combining with motion analysis, stress/strain analysis and others is easier to achive.
• Visual reality allows better visualization of end product at design stage.

Problems in moving to 3D

While the use of 3D models sounds like a good idea, there are various hurdles that need to be surpassed before the advantages are realised. Some of the hurdles that companies may encounter:

• Design/Manufacturing companies have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of drawings still in 2D format. Most of this data is still very important to the company and cannot be neglected while the company looks forward to implementing 3D modeling. The task of converting all this legacy data to 3D would be mind-boggling.
• Manual conversion of all this legacy data would take years to complete.
• While many CAD systems include productivity tools that help designers interactively re-use portions of the legacy drawings while building the 3D model, is a far cry from being a valid and viable solution as the designer is still embroiled in a near manual conversion process. PTC's AutobuildZ for Pro/Engineer and SolidWorks 2D-to-3D are two such tools bundled in with the CAD system itself.
• The process of interpreting the 2D drawing to understand and re-create its 3D counterpart is a tedious one, especially if the drawing is complicated. This process has to be repeated for each drawing encountered.

The Solution: Reconsprite

Reconsprite software has created the Reconsprite 2D to 3D Converter that works to overcome many of the problems associated with the conversion of legacy 2D machine piece part drawings to 3D parametric, feature-based models. With over 6 years of research and development behind the suite, Reconsprite is one of the most mature conversion softwares available in the market. The next few paragraphs explain in more detail how Reconsprite helps in solving the problems stated above during the 2D-to-3D conversion process.

Reconsprite 2D to 3D converter performs three primary validations. The first validation is on the geometry and the geometric intersections. Some simple geometric errors, such as duplicate and/or overlapping entities are automatically corrected during this check. Geometric errors such as lines not quite connecting or extending too far are left up to the user to correct.

A second validation step in Reconsprite will analyze the input drawing views for alignment. Again, a message indicating which views are misaligned will be displayed for the designer.

The third validation step runs checks across orthographic views check to see if potential features have a match in the matching orthographic views. This validation check is an information check only. Again, a resulting information message will be created from this test.

Reconsprite is an easy to use, legacy drawing conversion tool built specifically with the designer in mind. With over 6 years of research and development behind it, there are many advantages to using Reconsprite to help with the conversion process. The following are the most advantageous features:

• Reconsprite outputs a feature-based, parametric 3D model in the native AutoCAD format.
• Reconsprite supports the most number of geometric features among all the competitive products available in the market - extrusions, revolves, simple and complex holes (counterbore, countersink, tapped, drill tip angle), fillets and chamfers.
• Reconsprite plugs into the AutoCAD version of your choice. Designers can choose the AutoCAD version that suits them best and Reconsprite will help convert the 2D drawing into a native AutoCAD model in that chosen AutoCAD version.
• Your 3D model is conveniently stored in a feature-based format should you need to recover the output of your 2D to 3D conversion process.
• Geometric and mathematical rule based algorithms help analyze and process drawing entity relationships to ensure error-free geometric features.
• Support for automatic view recognition of orthographic views unlike the other products in the market.