Jerry P (aka SNOOPYbrown Zamboni) asked this past week if I could ‘port the Pro/E “rocket launcher” file (see my earlier post which explains what that is) into the Second Life simulation (something to do with MAKE magazine’s Phillip Torrone giving a presentation). Unfortunately I don’t really have time to do it all. More importantly, because I never intended to take that particular 3D file back into a virtual environment, I didn’t concern myself with surface complexity. It was intended for fabrication. And real parts are complex. Importing that mess of triangles is going to be… interesting.

Anyway, after spending almost an entire day on the main conversion this weekend and getting a lot of messages like “Unable to triangulate part Q3ROCKET-FZ. Aborting output.”, I got something out to a mesh file (a vrml) and shipped it on it’s way. What a major pain that was; especially the surface repairs. Glad this one is out of my hair. But now that I’ve spent all that time cleaning up the surfaces to go “solid”, I’m considering making a working toy from this. Wonder if it’s worth the trouble. More importantly, what would id have to say about that?