Ever use the "cross your fingers and pray" regeneration method?
I just finished the biggest model I've ever done. Just shy of 1000 features (nope, not a bunch of patterned features, and not a bunch of holes etc) the majority of the features are VSS and surface by boundary. Very large injection molded part with shut offs, flow channels and lots of details; gated in about 18 places with gas assist. Mostly a symmetric design, somewhere around feature 800 I had to do the mirror and merge thing and a solidification test which is where I found myself doing the "come on baby" chant and it occurred to me how absurd this part of the job can be (I mean, come on, how often does a grown man cross his fingers?), so I thought I'd post about it for the humor.
Turned out well. Only one geom check error (tiny edge) on a model without hardly a single straight or flat surface in it.
Anybody here working on anything cool?
I think, when I get really, seriously bored, I turn a job into much more than it was intended to be (so it turns out to be a learning experience for me) and, so, for those around who're interested.
Recently, they asked me to make 57 cable connections in a 19" rack (something I know/knew absolutely nothing about). When it came to the cables (and witnessing a growing number of circular references from cheap version of top-down modeling), I decided on trying a cabling skeleton model. To this, I added enough geometry for cable routing and about 120 terminations for about 57 cables (some had multiple terninations.)
On each ternination, I created a publish geom (at the component level or at the assembly level with Activate). Each consisted of a point, an axis and a surface. These component features were copied into the skeleton by activating the skeleton in the top level assembly adn then doing 'Insert>Shared Data>Copy Geom' and picking the 'Publish Geom' menu item, then picking a component's Pub_Geom feature, MM 'Accept', adding it to the skeleton reference geometry. When I also used the skeleton csys to quickly assemble the 57 cables, I merely needed to reference, one cable at a time, the skeleton geometry that would locate and guide the cable path. Not a circular reference in the bunch and several moved components with no loss of cable reference (screwy supporting geometry, but nothing worse). This was my trial by fire on skeleton models, in a big way, for this type of work and it came out OK, not the nail biter you describe, Polymer Man, but, still, on a local pioneer path and one that the natives are still gawking at (and hopefully learning from by breaking out of comfortable, safe little boxes).
Pioneer and teacher, ever and always, may we all be so lucky, David Janes