Model Units Property

Some import types (ACIS and AutoCAD) allow you to specify the units of the imported model. Before clicking Generate, you may be able to change the model units from the Details View, depending on the type of import. Note that some model types store their units, so no Model Units property will appear when importing them.

For ACIS files specifically, the Model Units property will initially show Default as its value. This means the model units will be retrieved from the ACIS file itself. In the event that the ACIS file has no units specified, it will adopt the units of the current DesignModeler session. You may still force the model units to any specific unit by setting the Model Units property to the unit of your choice.

Base Plane Property

The Import External Geometry File feature has a property called Base Plane. This allows you to specify the coordinate system into which the model is brought. When creating a new Import External Geometry File feature, the active plane is chosen as the Base Plane by default. You can change the Base Plane by selecting planes from the feature Tree Outline.

Operation Property

The Import External Geometry File feature also has an Operation property. This allows you to do things other than add bodies to your model.

Note that the Add Material option does not always apply. The DesignModeler application will not add material when the Import consists of multiple bodies AND active bodies already exist in the current model. In this case, the DesignModeler application will automatically apply the "Add Frozen" material type instead and mark the feature with a warning. For Import External Geometry File features in all .agdb files prior to this upgrade, the default operation is Add Material.

Body Filtering Property

There are four body filtering properties:

Their value is set in the Project Schematic and they determine what bodies will be imported to the DesignModeler application. The default setting is Yes for Solid and Surface Bodies and No for Line Bodies. File formats that support line body imports include ACIS, CATIA V5 (Spatial and CAPRI), IGES, Parasolid, Creo Parametric, Solid Edge, SOLIDWORKS, and STEP.

The following table shows the expected body imports based on the composition of the part (top row) and the mixed dimension import resolution preference. It is assumed for this table that the body types indicated in the part are selected in the primary import options.

This processing becomes significant after handling the basic import options (e.g. if a part is Solid-Surface-Line, but only Import Solids is selected, the solid bodies would be imported).

When importing a file with an extension of ".mcnp", all body filtering properties will be read only. The property Process Solid Bodies will be set to Yes and the other two will be set to No because only solid bodies may be defined in Monte Carlo N-Particle files.

Blade Sets Property

This property appears only when importing BladeGen models. With this property, you can specify how many blade sets to import. If the value is zero, or if the number entered is greater than the number of blade sets in the model, then all blade sets are imported. The default value is 1.

Refresh Property

Sometimes an imported CAD file may have changed since it was first imported into the DesignModeler application. To reflect changes made to the CAD file in the DesignModeler application, change the Refresh property to Yes. This will cause the DesignModeler application to refresh the imported geometry the next time you click Generate.

Note that when you modify the Process property or change the CAD source, the Refresh is automatically set to Yes.