Dan:
I suspect the end point is their software really wants beziers for long contours.
I belive its all about architecture. One of the reasons I keep saying I don't want
to write a cad program is architecture. A drawing program's underlying architecture is
something almost locked in from start of development, which is fine if you know
exactly where your going, if not, you get into a situation I fond myself in a few years
after I start anything, I often dont know the end destination so I code in directions
that lead me into odd places. Had I KNOWN for example, that flourishes and drawing
would begin to play a fundamental part in Gearotic, my internal databases would be better
suited to drawing, unfortunately, since I deal in Gears primarily, my databases
are more setup for chains of points, not arcs and lines.
Things like this are good and bad at once. Chains of data points are hard to query
as to things like adding lines and arcs to drawings, but very easy to do other operations
such as extruding and manipulating data. Fusion, probably requires drawing entities to be
nodes that have a lot of information in them, so each line has an entry in the database,
and since the dxf's from gearotic are outputting poly lines, it likely breaks them into
individual lines. That would get heavy fast.
The lesson here is that poly-line entities are probably getting out of favor at autodesk,
with a preference for bezier curves. This makes sense to me as I suspect they use
3d beziers to effect solids for algorithmic reasons. Clever mathematicians can do algorithms
on beziers to join them in space and manipulate them in fantastic ways for 3d work
and meshing where lines and arcs are more difficult to work with for 3d op's.
I have pondered all of this for several months in the background since Ive heard
of the trouble. My conclusion is that I will have to effect a bezier output in the future.
I'm not there yet though. Gearotic doesn't like entities much like lines ,arcs etc.
It prefers to think only of points in series. While Ive added arcs and such for next
release, they , in the end, will devolve to chains of points internally as you work with them,
trimming them and such.
Were I to do a Gearotic from scratch, my database would look quite different.
All that having been said, chains allow for special ways to process internally that
give me some power entities don't have. The next version has French curves for example,
a tool that allows one to use a selectable ( and even user drawable )french curve cursor
to trim an object, something unusual because its very hard under normal cad databases.
So Ive decided most things in Gearotics drawings will devolve internally from lines
and arcs to a single polychain when a user interacts with them. At some point I will
add a tool to reconvert them to lines and arcs if one wishes, OR, to save them as
beziers, which would likely make Fusion very happy, as it would then only have 1
entity as a chain, which is how gearotic holds them.
So I think Fusion wants not a contour, but a bezier, which is odd
as you'd think they'd just convert from one to the other..but it doesn't look like
it to me. So instead of having one bezier entitity with perhaps a hundred control
points, they get thousands of individual lines, each requiring their own entry
in their database.
So at some point I will add a bezier output, and a proper bezier class,
as that would allow me to attempt a Nurbs command in Gcode for a smoother
way of doing massive small point moves in GCode. Thats likely a summer
project though as its very complex to do Nurbs in a trajectory planner
respecting jerk and speed limits. Doable though I think..maybe..
So Ill keep in mind this issue, and will issue tweaks as I can to help,
with the aim of adding proper b curve outputs that I "think" would solve
the issue permanently.
Thx
Art