"Daniel" wrote : I have a large number of small tubes that I am building as swept : protrusions. There will be >8000 tubes per pathway with three pathways : total. One pathway causeed drastic slow downs in Pro Wildfire 2 so I : wonder what folks find the most useful and flexible amoung the tools : in ProE for large assemblies. : Well, Dan, you started this paragaph with swept protrusions and wound up with large assemblies. You haven't presented a connection and it certainly isn't obvious. To make your situation more difficult and intriguing, you have 8000 'tubes' per 'pathway'. The 'pathway' I will assume is your sweep trajectory. Now, did you make 8000 tubes (8000 circles extruded once) or make one tube following one trajectory and place it in an assembly 8000 times?
Actually, in either case, try making the tubes as surfaces. They are much more 'lightweight' features, easier to pattern, place, regenerate. After they are placed or patterned, you can always 'Solidify' as a thin protrusion later. But get all the heavy lifting done first with the surfaces and as a last step, solidify if needed.
: These numbers ideally will be easy to change with a table driven : layout.
If components are patterned in the assembly, the pattern is easily turned into a table, even without a layout. Table is one of the choices in the Type selection (linear, radial, diametral, table). How this would work in a layout, I'm not sure of, but should be possible.
That said, if you are regenerating an assembly with 24000 components, expect delays. It would be less a burden on the system to have one tube of each trajectory type as a representative and a table for each telling x,y position. Is that what you're thinking about?
David Janes