Delete Bodies??

Arlin,

Delete "solid bodies" doesn't really delete. It creates a feature, that when deleted, restores the solid bodies. I've already had a "talk" with one of our I.D. guys on the proper use of multi-body solids. Seems he thought it would be a good idea to knock out a quick concept using MB instead of an assembly. OK...., Then he thought all he had to do to finish the design was hide the unused solids in each part, save as a different name, and bring all fifty of the parts together into an assembly. Of course each of the fifty parts (not simple ones either) had fifty other parts residing in them that were hidden. You can imagine how big the data base was....sheeees !!!!

Creating a delete body feature didn't seem to make it much smaller, but it did allow me to translate indiviual parasolids, to my CAM system, without the whole assembly popping up. We agreed that he would be more organized in the future. He would keep the features for each discreet body in a seperate folder. This way unneeded geometry can be truley deleted without having to untangle a hairball.

Regards

Mark

I guess this suggestion is a little late but if a you use 'Split Part' on a MB part, it will automatically create separate parts from each body as well as the assembly. Each part will only have one feature because it is derived from the original MB part so the database would be relatively small.

JJ

JJ,

Thanks for the suggestion.. I knew there was a cleaner way. Just didn't think of it in the heat of the moment. This guy is a very creative and talented designer. He just get a litttle "to creative" in the wrong areas sometimes.

Regards

Mark

Yes, I understand your point here. Multibodies are not a substitute to assemblies. I agree.

I was more concerned with surface models in my original post. In many situations, construction surfaces are used in 'curvy stuff' for things like guide curves and tangency constraints. In the end, I often see a whole slew of surfaces, only a few of which actually represent the final model; the rest are usually just hidden. Even if the surface model is solidified, a bunch of extra hidden surfaces are left.

I just think it may be a better modeling practice to add a delete body feature for each construction surface as soon it is no longer needed. This cleans up the model and clarifies intent.

'Delete Surface' might be better and/or more efficient. Then again, it may not.

JJ

I have been doing this for a while, and discovered I like it A LOT. It really helps make complex models easier to follow and quicker to edit, especially when surfacces or extra solid bodies are created just for workarounds, establishing drafts at parting lines, or other local uses.

Of course, there will be a hit on rebuild time, so one has to strike a balance between the time blown scanning a complex featrue tree trying to find just the thing to adjsut, and the processors time.

-Ed

Hmmm... never really thought about the performance impact. Does a delete body feature really take much processing time? I would expect it to be pretty simple. After all, no complex calculations need to happen; just remove a body from the part database.

Guess I will need to do some investigating...

"Delete Body" definitely has a useful place in SW. Like all features, it has the potential to be grossly misapplied.

I use delete bodies at the end of a model to eliminate "tool surfaces" that aren't consumed by features such as "cut with surface". It makes for a cleaner model. Also, the deleted body isn't likely to spontaneously reappear in another configuration, as can happen when just hiding a body.

Also, a deleted body won't show up in an export. Yes, I know I can export only selected bodies. However, sometimes sales gets ambitious and does their own exporting!

yikes! sales has access to models?

Arlin,

I'm confused by this. How does removing the surfaces that defined the edges and tangencies clarify design intent? To me, it's the other way around. If the surfaces really are gone, then I've got no way to get back to the design intent. Hiding the construction surfaces so that they don't obscure the final part seems the best solution to me.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems