Sheet Metal Feature Recognition

Table of Contents

• Capabilities
• Scope of accepted geometries
• API overview
• Limitations

The recognition can be run on a CAD file to find sheet metal features, e.g. bends, beads, holes, cutouts, etc. As a result of the recognition, list of found features of the part will be returned.

As the API changes to accommodate the needs of users compatibility will be preserved as much as possible but is ultimately not guaranteed.

Capabilities

It is possible to recognize bends of various types (simple, curved, hem or compound), beads, bridges, louvers, cutouts, holes, tabs and notches. A detailed description of the features is given here.

Below is a simple example of recognition.

Sheet Metal model	Features
	9x Bend 12x Hole 3x Complex Hole 1x Bead 4x Bridge 46x Cutout 2x Notch

• Sheet Metal Features

Scope of accepted geometries

The recognition can be run on B-Rep representations, namely it works with ModelData::Shell or ModelData::Solid .

API overview

SheetMetal_FeatureRecognizer is the class that performs sheet metal feature recognition.

There are 2 ways to perform recognition:

• Using SheetMetal_FeatureRecognizer on its own and processing the detected features. Sheet Metal Feature Recognizer Example demonstrates this approach.
• If a part needs to be processed by SheetMetal_FeatureRecognizer and SheetMetal_Unfolder, one can reduce computation time by running the tools as part of the SheetMetal_Analyzer.Perform(), as shown below:

  ModelData::Solid aSolid = ...;
  SheetMetal_Analyzer anAnalyzer;
  anAnalyzer.AddTool (SheetMetal_FeatureRecognizer());
  anAnalyzer.AddTool (SheetMetal_Unfolder());
  SheetMetal_Data aData = anAnalyzer.Perform (aSolid, 1 /* as default value for thickness */);
   
  MTKBase_FeatureList aFeatures = aData.FeatureList();
  /* Process features */
   
  ModelData::Shell anUnfoldedShape = aData.UnfoldedShell();
  /* Process unfolded sheet metal */

The resulting SheetMetal_Data can be passed as an input parameter for tools. But make sure to not using empty SheetMetal_Data. Simply run SheetMetal_Analyzer without adding any tool to get minimum required SheetMetal_Data. It can be used to get thickness and / or to run sheet metal tools separately with SheetMetal_Data.

Limitations

Sheet Metal tools are sensitive to the models' thickness. In order to get acceptable results, use a model with constant thickness. Otherwise, results can be inaccurate.