I have a large assembly of a machine. I want to give this to a consultant company for them to incorporate it in a model of the building where the machine is supposed to be.
How do I "protect" the assembly from being taken apart and investigated?
Can I "compile" a model from the assembly - and then also make it smaller?
Only give them as much as they need. Supress all internal details, "join" all parts in an assembly, convert to parasolid. This will give them a monolithic block that represents enough for a floor layout.
Depending on complexity, the surfaces technique may slow things down significantly, but check it out to see if it works for you.
There's another interesting method if you want to check it out. Save your model as an STL file, then open it in SolidWorks, and in the open dialog, hit the Options button. You can then bring it in as a "graphics body". This gives you visual data, but no solid geometry (like an eDrawing, or a permanently lightweight part), so it can be put in an assembly, but cannot be measured or "FeatureWorksed". It can't be mated either, which is an obvious drawback, but you could use planes to position it.
On the downside, I've tried to make patterns of graphics bodies, and it doesn't work the way you might expect it to..., and there are a few other quirks, but it might be worth investigating.
matt
"steve" wrote in news:3faaaeda$0$27474$ snipped-for-privacy@dread16.news.tele.dk:
1) hide the features (surfaces) from the feature manager. I don't know if it is possible to hide also the "surface bodies". Note that the macro can easily be modified to show the features again, so it is not really a "protection"
2) change the names of all surfaces so that they don't match the parn name anymore. Is this what you want ?
PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.