Support Request: Using Zoo for Manufacturing Tooling Design

Hello Zoo Support Team,

I’m working on implementing Zoo for manufacturing tooling design and have some questions about the workflow. Our goal is to develop custom tooling solutions based on existing part geometries to address specific production challenges.

Could you please provide guidance on the following key areas:

  1. CAD File Import
  • What file formats are supported for importing existing 3D CAD models?
  • What’s the recommended process for using these imported models as reference geometry for tooling design?
  1. Manufacturing Constraint Implementation
  • How can we specify manufacturing requirements such as tolerances and access limitations within Zoo?
  • Is there a way to define process-specific constraints that will influence the tooling design?
  1. Tooling Design Output
  • What’s the process for generating 3D CAD files of the tooling solutions?
  • How does Zoo incorporate both the reference part geometry and manufacturing constraints into the final design?

If you have any documentation, tutorials, or examples specifically related to manufacturing tooling design workflows, those would be extremely helpful. Additionally, any best practices you can share for this type of application would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your assistance,
Jonathon Tamm

Hey Jonathon,

Sorry for the delayed response. Currently, our Modeling App supports importing STEP, STL, OBJ, PLY, SLDPRT, and GLTF. This is an example of what an external file import would look like:

model = import("tests/inputs/cube.sldprt")

You can read more about it here. This allows the geometry to be in the modeling app, but you can not interact with the model today.

For your manufacturing workflows that you are asking for, those are currently in development. Not available today.