27 Feb Catia V5 Detectors

CATIA V5 detectors

Looking at a small box problem using a STEP file produced by CATIA V5 (started 2016feb05). All fine, STEP through CADLOOK to WRL file; then NV16 openGL viewer. However, box innards stuck out through the side on NOVICE*picture ray-trace perspectives.

Debugging the WRL file, found a new (for me) construct: geometry pointset which defines, it appears, detector points within the geometry model.

Already have a mechanism to ‘skip’ over other constructs, used previously for geometry indexedlineset so added the pointsets to any linesets and saved all on a text file preceeded by the current positioning matrix each time the construct is encountered.

After rerunning all through CAD_VRML, a new quick tool, SKIPPERS, reads the saved ‘skippers’ text file, gets the pointset coordinates, modifies by the positioning matrix, and writes to a ‘detectors.txt’ file, 46 points total in this STEP file. A simple ‘&get detectors.txt’ adds these detectors to the NOVICE data file.

The ‘detectors’ file includes argument definitions that describe the detectors as points or as ‘large’ spherical volumes (10 mm radius) for NOVICE*picture plots (*detector options automatically make volume detectors into geometry material regions and the o=3 overlap option ensures no conflict with other explicit geometry during ray-traces).

So, the ‘pointset’ problem is resolved. Commenting the spherical volume argument line, and the whole problem was then run without incident for both *SIGMA ray-tracing approximations and *ADJOINT Monte Carlo explicit proton, bremsstrahlung, primary and secondary electron, all 46 point detectors in under an hour.

Problem Resolved: the methods are added to the NOVICE User Interface for end-to-end CATIA-V5 STEP file to NOVICE*ouputs including STEP to WRL file conversions by CADLOOK (OEM).