Lately, I’ve been fiddling with writing an IGES CAD file format importer. I had written an IGES export a couple of years back so I have some experience with the format and although dated, it is still a widely used format. Priority-wise, I should rather be working on that shader permutation system or ubershader (not sure yet which path I’ll take), but I thought I’d take a break from conceptual/architecture work and importers are usually so straight forward, its kind of relaxing to “just code” for a while.
The screenshot above shows the first result: a rendering of the Autodesk’s Ember 3D Printer, for which they have opened sourced the IGES file. Since the IGES standard contains a large number of possible entities, it’s currently the only file the importer can perfectly import (including colors, grouping and group names), but adding support for other entities should now be easy.
Since I haven’t come around to write that NURBS tessellator, I currently only tessellate the trim curves for visualization and the result is what you can see above. I’m planning to write the full tessellator in the next couple of weeks as I will have a few days off. But first comes extending the IGES importer so it can handle all the test files I have. I found a couple of fairly large ones on GrabCAD which I’m pretty exited about to get working in my software.
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