Hello everyone,
since I come from the VIz. industry and I am new to the whole NX pipeline, I apologize in advance for any wrong naming of NX functions.
My goal is to establish a working pipeline for material definition export from NX to any type of an export format (STEP, IGES etc.). The exported files are then passed to the visualization department, which is working with Autodesk 3dsMax and a rendering engine of their choice. Material definition is a huge problem in our current NX > STEP > Autodesk pipeline, since no named materials are being exported into the STEP format.
As stated at https://www.cax-if.org/ there is a way to store materials inside of a STEP file. For example, the following file contains a material defininion for "AMS 4928; Titanium 6-4":
https://www.cax-if.org/library/dm1-id-214.zip
My questions are:
1) How do I assign / export material definition from NX to STEP to achieve a result like in the ZIP file above?
2)The Material assignment for Viz may vary, e.g. "Steel" can have anisotropic or isotropic reflective parameters.
One can assign custom attributes, where a descriptive material name could be given to a part. This would be enough to parse the exported STEP file in Viz. for material assignment.
Is there a generic way to export custom attributes (assigned through part properties in NX) to STEP, or any other export format?
3) In general: is there a way to export "DB_PART_NAME", "DB_PART_DESC" etc. to STEP,or any other export format?
I would prefer to go with (2) aund (3), since a single material name / property would not suffice the visualization requirements in many cases. Writing a parser for object names containing the "DB_PART_NAME" and some custom material name on the other hand would yield the proper object handling and shouldn't be a great deal.
We have NX 8.5 at aour disposal, upgrading now to V.10 (will still take some time though).
Thanks a lot for your help!