Functions Introduced:

A common reason for extracting the solid geometry of a model is to pass it to another MCAE tool for some kind of engineering analysis. Not all of the other MCAE tools share the rich variety of geometry equation types supported by , and therefore may not be able to import all the surface descriptions directly. Because many MCAE systems use nonuniform rational B-splines (NURBS) to model surfaces and edges, you frequently need to convert many or all of the surface descriptions to NURB splines.

The function ProSurfaceToNURBS() operates on a surface of any type. The function makes an accurate approximation of the shape of the surface using a NURBS, and outputs a pointer to the structure ProSurfacedata. This structure contains the surface type PTC_B_SPLSRF, which describes the form of the NURBS.

The function ProEdgeToNURBS() finds a one-dimensional NURBS that approximates a solid edge. The function outputs a pointer to the ProCurvedata union whose b_spline field contains the NURBS description.

The function ProCurveToNURBS() provides the same functionality as ProEdgeToNURBS(), but for a datum curve.

Both ProSurfacedata and ProCurvedata are declared in the header file ProGeomitem.h.