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GetStarted.md

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Get Started

Command line interface

Following installation (see wiki/Installation.md), the starting point for users is the command line:

geomPipeline.py imprint your_geometry_file_path

(with your_geometry_file_path replaced by the path to your geometry.)

This starts the geometry pipeline. geomPipeline.py takes 2 positional arguments, the first is the action, and the second is the input file path.

Optional arguments for all pipelines:

  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o OUTPUT_FILE, --output-file OUTPUT_FILE
                        output file name (without folder path)
  --working-dir WORKING_DIR
                        working folder path, by default the current working folder
  --config              only generate config.json without run the pipeline

  -nt THREAD_COUNT, --thread-count THREAD_COUNT
                        number of thread to use, max = hardware core number

  -v VERBOSITY, --verbosity VERBOSITY
                        verbosity: for console or terminal: DEBUG, PROGRESS, INFO, WARNING, ERROR

Optional arguments for the geometry pipeline:

  --metadata METADATA   input metadata file, only for brep input geometry
  --tolerance TOLERANCE
                        tolerance for imprinting, unit MilliMeter
  --no-merge            do not merge the imprinted shapes, for two-step workflow
  --suppress-failed       ignore failed (in BOP check, collision detect, etc) solids

Always run geomPipeline.py -h to get the latest arguments.

Geometry preprocessing features

Implemented geometry processing actions are: check,detect,merge,imprint,search, some other planned actions tessellate, fix, decompose can be found in Roadmap.md

The imprint action outputs a geometry file (*._processed.brep) of one shape with duplicated shared faces removed, and also a *_processed_metadata.json file of meta data. The latter file contains meta data such as material information for the geometry brep file. All the output files are located in a folder in the current directory.

The imprint operation is accomplished in 2 steps: Imprint faces and Merge faces: geomPipeline.py imprint geometry_file --thread-count 6 --no-merge geomPipeline.py merge /home/qxia/Documents/StepMultiphysics/parallel-preprocessor/result --thread-count 6

Usage of other actions such as search, check, detect, decompose

geomPipeline.py check geometry_file will check for errors, e.g. volume too small, invalid geometry, etc geomPipeline.py detect geometry_file will detect collision between solid shapes, see more shape spatial relationship types defined in the type Geom::CollisionType

Input geometry format supported

  • FreeCAD native format, *.FCStd
  • Step geometry exchange format, *.step
  • OpenCASCADE native format, *.brep/*.brp, may combined with *.metadata.json (PPP output meta data format)
  • a json manifest file: a list of dict (geometry file path + material name)
    [{"material": "Copper",  "filename": "path_to_geometry_file1" },
     {"material": "Steel",  "filename": "path_to_geometry_file2" }]

see doxygen generate document for this class for most updated information <>

Debug your installation

which geomPipeline on Unix-like system, or where geomPipeline on Windows to see if executable has been installed on PATH.

NOTE: if installed using deb/rpm on ubuntu and fedora, while user has anaconda activated, then user will not be able to use c-extension module ppp. For example, on Ubuntu the ppp module ppp.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so is installed to /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/. In that case, python3 /usr/bin/geomPipeline.py manifest.json will start an external process by python to run pipeline without using ppp module.

On windows, a batch file calling may be generated to run python script "geomPipeline.py" without "python path_to/geomePipeline.py".

Advanced usage (adjust pipeline parameters)

Pipeline configuration generation (python script)

geomPipeline.py will generate a json configuration based on user input (by default config.json in the current folder), then starts the geometry preprocessing pipeline. For example, the imprint action will be organized into a pipeline of several GeometryProcessors, with default parameters written into the config.json.

If the output is not ideal, users can edit parameters in the generated config.json and re-run the pipeline by python3 geomPipeline.py config.json, or equally pppGeomPipeline path_to_json_config.json.

Actually, all the processing computation is done by pppGeomPipeline which is an executable compiled from C++ code. This executable only accepts a json configuration file, e.g. pppGeomPipeline path_to_json_config.json.

The split of high-level user-oriented python script and lower-level C++ program has the benefits:

  • to ease the debugging of mixed python and C++ programming
  • to ease the parallel programming, since Python has the GIL problem