Hi,
I’m having quite the time importing surfaces from Rhino (5) into Solidworks (2014). I’ve tried all kinds of operations (exporting as .iges, .step, Rhino 4, and parasolid and nothing seems to work. Just to make sure I didn’t have some sort of issue with my specific surface I exported a flat planar square and got the same gap issue I had with my original part.
I have attempted the “heal all gaps” and the “gap closer” operation in solidworks and it doesn’t seem to work either.
Cheers,
Mark
Try lowering your tolerances in Rhino before exporting and then try again.
What did you have your unit tolerance set at when you created the original part in Rhino?
The default unit tolerance in Rhino is very low (3 decimal points even if you are working in inches) and can cause issues when bringing in to SolidWorks which I think is at 7 or 8 by default
Did you export a plane or a box? A box is mathematically “exact” so it’s not a tolerance issue(and your tolerances don’t need to be insane for SW to sew them up) it’s more like…what are you trying to do with it? I’ve had the best luck with IGES.
I exported a plane. I’ll try and upload an attachment to show what I’m trying to do. I had orginally created the part in Rhino and exported it as a polysurface but I found that the import was really messy and I wasn’t able to have as much edit-ability as I needed. What I would like to do is just import the surfaces so I have more ability to edit the part once its in solidworks.
On another note. I did try increasing the model tolerances in Rhino but it didn’t really import properly into Solidworks with those tighter tolerances.
Thanks for all the suggestions so far! I feel like a solution is right around the corner 
I can’t see from that what the problem could be, it’s certainly not very complex, either there’s something wrong with this other than tolerances(NOTE: just changing the tolerance settings in Rhino does nothing to your geometry, you would need to untim and retrim)or your expectations about what can be done with this in Solidworks are incorrect. Best to ask on the actual Rhino support forum.
So one thing I notice is you have a surface that looks like it’s been trimmed to a point. Other than that, the surfaces seem to be extremely simple so I’m having a hard time seeing why you’d have a big problem.
FWIW, that geometry seems very simple - why not just create it in Solidworks in the first place? Usually the advantage of using Rhino as the first step is to get some really organic complex surfacing that would be much harder with Solidworks.
OT, but this reminds me of an engineer I worked with that was curious to my modeling approach, to which I replied that I mostly use Surfaces without further explaining anything. On his next project he modeled a flat-surfaced plastic thing that could be done with extrude-cut extrude-shell, entirely out of surfaces knit together at the end! Wall thickness and everything. 300 features instead of 3.
A for effort at least…
