Hi,
Today I'm attempting to take an extruded volume representing oil and subtract the internals of the gearbox and housings. In the end I would of course have a valid volume for the oil fill.
The cutout feature does not work to remove an assembly - I assume this is because it will contain coincident surfaces.
Will a shrinkwrap work? If so, how do I structure it? I'm sure this can be done with surface features, but boy would that be a tedious waste of time.
Dave
Not sure what you mean by "an extruded volume". If this is an assembly feature, it really needs to be a separate component.
Should work to remove the volumes you require, a component at a time. If the functionality isn't available thru 'Insert>Advanced>Cutout from other model' it should be available under 'Edit>Component Operations>Cutout'. You would want to do this with only the components that are at least partially submerged and displacing oil so it might not be that many components. It also doesn't work on packaged components, so it could be bombing on something set up as a mechanism which it regards as packaged.
As a feature, no, as a component, it should. And use 'auto hole filling' to avoid slivers of material. You could also try exporting the assembly as IGES solids, reimporting as a 'Part' and exporting again.
You could also try creating your component to act as the removing geometry with 'Copy geometry' or 'Copy Shrinkwrap from other model'. It's not necessary to manually select all the surfaces.
Yes, it's an assembly component, and I started by extruding a rectangular volume that just encompasses the interior of the gearbox. It's the subtraction of the components that I've yet to accomplish.
I tried this, but after the 3rd or 4th component it started bonking with geometry errors. I figured it was due to edge-edge contact between the components, or sliver geometry or something like that. This issue, and the number of internal component to subtract, is why I started thinking shrinkwrap.
Not using Mechanism, but thanks for the heads-up.
The IGES is a good idea, but I think we're both aware that it loses parametricity.
With the shrinkwrap, I assume you mean to: create a shrinkwrap of the housing and submerged parts, and use that component to do a single subtraction from the oil volume?
Thanks David.
Dave
How many significant immersed and partially immersed parts are we talking about?
Dave, I say do it with surfaces. Not iges them out. Instead create a part called volume, then assemble it with the main assembly. While in the assembly you can modify the volume part and use surface copy to get all the components and it will remain parametric. Does that make sense? That's normally how I do it and it works really well. Dave
Total immersed parts: about 75. Significant volume: probably 15. I tried going thru the cutouts with the signficant parts only but it failed by the third component. (I wonder if changing the accuracy setting would help - most of the parts are modeled with relative accuracy, but because they are legacy components used in many other assemblies I don't want to modify them.)
If I did the surfaces it would take a LONG time I suspect, since not only would I need to collect all of the surfaces, I'd have to clean up any holes, coincident surfaces, eliminate clearances, etc. Of course then it would carry a large failure burden every time something in the assembly changes.
Thanks for the suggestions. I was kind of hoping there was an elegant way to remove the whole assembly in a few steps, but apparently there isn't (at least with the geometry set I'm using). It's just oil volume, after all.
David
Robert Head wrote:
Well I tried the cutout again and as with many things Pro/E, today it decided to work. It was a little tedious making a feature for every significant intersecting component, but the result is what I wanted.
So the final 'answer' for me was:
Structure: Top Level Assembly
-- Gearbox and internals(.asm)
-- Oil Volume (.prt) (created in the assembly)
I then edited the oil volume in the context of the top level assembly and created Shared Data->Cutout feature, selecting a .prt within the gearbox assembly. Repeat for all significant components.
Dave
Accuracy probably contributes, but the root is trying to merge some complicated shapes into a single solid body.
Maybe worth trying ideas for next time around...
_Create a part and merge the significant parts (or copy surf; select a face, RMB, Solid Surfs) and Solidify. Do a One Sided Volume analysis and subtract that from the case volume rep.
_ Create a simp rep of the internal components, assy cut to oil level, subtract the volume of what's left from case volume. (Shame we can't do a One Sided Volume of an assy simp rep, huh?)
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