2D export and capture view behavior

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Valentin R asked Jun 1, '23 Natalie White commented Jun 7, '23

2D export and capture view behavior

Dear reader,

I've been regularly having projects in which we develop a layout. The client often need to use the result of our study to be an input for other people/software. The current problem with FlexSim is that we can only export a capture of a view which does not provide sizing and positioning information.

Is there a possibility for you to develop some kind of .dwg export using a projection of objects with shown shape ?
Or is it possible to include a feature adding a grid over the capture to allow an easier copy of the layout into another software ?

Another thing I would like to mention is that increasing the resolution of the captured view does not behave as it probably should. When increasing the resolution, the result is not the current view with just a better resolution but is the current view zoomed out. Which means that the current view area does still has the same resolution but the resulting image includes a more larger area that just the one shown in the view window. Is that normal ?

Best regards,

Val

Software Version:

FlexSim 22.2.0

export 3d view capture

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Natalie White commented · Jun 07, 2023 at 06:59 PM

Hi @Valentin R, was Jordan Johnson's answer helpful? If so, please click the "Accept" button at the bottom of their answer. Or if you still have questions, add a comment and we'll continue the conversation.

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Answer 1 · 2023-06-02T23:09:00Z

Jordan Johnson answered Jun 2, '23 Joerg Vogel commented Jun 3, '23

We have an item on the dev list for being able to export to CAD. I will be sure to add this post to that issue.

As far as getting a picture of a layout, I made a demo model of an approach you might use:

Draw2DDemo.fsm

If you open the GUI from the toolbox (right-click and choose "Show GUI") you'll get a graph view. that draws the objects in the model on top of a grid. You could add a button to that GUI and call viewtofile() on that window. You should be able to pan/zoom (although zoom happens from the top-left instead of the cursor), so you can get exactly the screenshot you want.

The idea behind this model is that you could build on and/or use a window like this in your projects, as a workaround.

As far as the resolution question, yes, as far as I know, that's normal/as designed. I don't recall exactly why, but it's something about the aspect ratio of the 3D view vs the requested resolution. I think if we changed it, then it would be possible to capture a view without any of your objects present. Something like that.

draw2ddemo.fsm (54.5 KiB)

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Joerg Vogel commented · Jun 03, 2023 at 09:07 AM

A very long time ago there had existed a very simple 2D view of a model in FlexSim. I think I saw it up to a very early version of 3. There had existed also a tool called model documentation to provide basic data on all objects in a html format like location, dimension and trigger data.

@Valentin R, what you see as an error is more a feature. You set a level of resolution by your view and then you can export a larger area of this by a larger capture size. Both view point and capture size are parameters you can combine in an user command to get standardized outputs of your projects. I would setup an user workspace in an company environment to have access to those standard tools. This is a general procedure in many companies if they setup their tools for CAD.

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