Unigraphics
Unigraphics (abbreviated UG) is a high-end CAD/CAM system, available
for student use at USC, courtesy of EDS/Unigraphics, which has
a long-standing history of collaboration with the Programmable
Automation Lab.
The system is powerful, but it also is large and complex. The
following notes are meant as a roadmap to facilitate learning
the rudiments of the system, so as to be able to model objects
in it, and to create files for "solid printing" via
rapid prototyping machines.
Starting Up
UG runs in any of USC's color SPARC workstations with 32 MB of
memory under Solaris 2.x, and also in the 'aludra' server. It
is recommended that you run in a workstation, because the system
takes over 80MB of memory when running in the server, and often
gets killed because it exceeds the preset process memory limits.
To be able to use UG add to your .login
file:
if (-e /usr/usc/ugii/default/setup.csh) then
source /usr/usc/ugii/default/setup.csh
endif
To start UG type
ugii
Reading the Documentation
The main window and the graphics window come up. The main window
covers the whole screen. It is best to make this window fairly
small, and also to reduce the graphics window. Click help
on the title bar and then select Documentation.
A separate window using the Worldview documentation package appears.
Select CAD, and then Unigraphics
Essentials. Read the introduction and ignore the "user
exits" section and applications other than gateway and modeling.
Read the introduction to each of the chapters to see what is in
them. Ignore the appendices. The most relevant chapters are 6,
on how to control the display (the "rotate" command
is especially useful), 7 on work coordinate systems, and portions
of 14, on how to define points, lines, and so on.
In the Modeling manual, again read
the introduction and the chapter introductions. The most useful
sections are on creating features, feature operations, sketching
and editing.
Using the System
To get started try to do something similar to the classroom demonstration.
Note that placing the mouse over any button produces a short description
of the button's effect. First, from the file
menu open a new file and give it some name of your choice, finishing
in .prt. Note that on the top left
corner of the graphics window there is a "traffic light".
When this light is green the system is ready for input; when it's
red, the system is computing. The graphics window shows the working
coordinate system XC, YC,
WC in orthographic projection along
the ZC axis.
From Applications select Modeling.
Then, from Toolbox select Sketch.
Use the Point Subfunction to create
a polygon by clicking on the cursor option and then on the endpoint
option to close the polygon. Then dimension the sketch using horizontal
and vertical dimensions. The system will not extrude an incompletely
dimensioned sketch. Assigning dimensions essentially parameterizes
the sketch and lets us later modify it by changing just the numeric
values of the dimensions.
Ignore the requests for names, and use mouse picks to identify
the entities you need. Normally the system puts you back in the
operation you just executed, in case you want to do another of
the same kind. This implies that sometimes you have to Cancel
to get out and into another operation. There are also occasions
in which more OKs are needed than
you would expect.
Now select Features from the Toolbox,and
pick the first option, extruded object. Take the defaults and
get a solid slab from your sketched polygon. To see it is 3-D,
go to View in the top menu bar, select
Rotate, and then drag the mouse in
the graphics window to change the viewpoint. The graphic window's
scroll bars serve to translate the image horizontally and vertically,
and to zoom.
Define other features and add and subtract them from the extruded
object. To edit, pick Edit from the
top menu bar.
Solid Printing
This should be easy, by selecting a rapid prototyping option in
the export category. But we don't yet have a license to use it,
so I haven't tried it yet.
Hard Copy Display
There may be a way of generating a PostScript file from the graphics
window from within UG, but I haven't found it. A convenient procedure
involves capturing the screen with Unix utilities. From a Shell
or Xterm window run xv.
A main window appears. Click the right mouse button on
it and the control window for xv appears.
Select Grab. This brings up another
window. Set the delay time to 5 or 10 seconds, click Autograb,
and quickly place the cursor on the window you want to capture.
You'll hear bells denoting the beginning and end of the capture.
Back in the control window click Print.
This pops the print window,
in which you just have to do OK, unless you want a print command
other than lpr.
Comments
Send me e-mail with suggestions on what you think is needed in this document. My goal is to provide something that gets you started, and is short. To do more sophisticated operations one has to read the documentation and try things out. The first contact with the system and the documentation can be a bit of a shock. Here I am just trying to help overcome it.