When you turn that on and then select "show parts only" for the BOM it hides the assembly in question altogether. It doesn't just leave it as an assembly in the BOM and show all the other parts.
Damn,
I was hoping this one was going to work.... Seemed to be the most logical.
Ben
snipped-for-privacy@semmlerclan.com wrote:
Phil,
Amen to that.
I bought my daughter a Sorento for her first car. Looked at a dozen other midsize SUV's in the process. The Sorento is built better and stronger than any of em. It has a full unibody with a hardened passenger area "ON TOP" of a full ladder frame. It's built like a freakin tank. Great warranty, and not a single problem in 45,000 miles.
Mark
The beefy frame is what attracted me to KIA.
TOP
wrote >> Why can't you use the "Show parts only" option on the BOM? With that
To change hats and come to SWX's defence for a minute......and then "dis" it again at the end.
You CAN have as many levels of sub-assemblies as you like and still show all the parts in the BOM as if they were added to the top level using the "show parts only" command. It is totally mis-named and ought to be called "show all components".
You can also mark each "dummy" sub-assy (i.e. ones that are just containers to simplify the assy structure) so that they do not appear in the BOM, but their contents still do.
Having said all that, it doesn't work that reliably for me. I've got a small assembly which uses sub-assys to let me add in groups of optional extras. Quite often many of the lines of the BOM are blank, or only some of the columns are populated, but if I do enough ctrl-Q rebuilds it eventually sorts itself out.
I've got another larger assy (not huge though) with sub-assys, and depending on which rebuild you look at, the number of items in the BOM varies between
51 and 58 !!
Did I say that was the only reason? From what I've seen of various CAD journals down the years, SWX has been THE most heavily advertised 3D package. Combine that with a cool, quite clever and easy-to-remember name, and it greatly helps the marketing effort.
Unless you create one-off, bespoke designs, changing CAD systems is a nightmare most companies won't contemplate unless there's an issue that's a complete job-stopper.
Not at all - the wider world hasn't heard of Inventor, but everyone has heard of Autocad.
The lack of PDM in the lower-end offerings is shameful, and the price when you include them is not attractive. You could get I-DEAS with PDM as standard for less than SWX (the merging with NX has killed that off). Sure, there were some things missing at that price (sheet metal for example), but it gives the lie to the argument that SWX is currently "great package for the price". I think it would be more accurate to say "an OK package for the price".
John H
John H
Why do all machine design guys think they are the center of the world, concerning their work with 3D CAD software? Of cause the amount of users of the nuts an bolts fraction are considerable, but they are definitely no measure for the requirements of a sophisticated and powerful cad software. Their only problem seems to be the amount of parts the software is still able to handle and to flatten 3d data again to 2d paper drawings with millions of crossing lines. ;-)
LOL 10.000 +++ parts consisting of piled up boxes and cylinders, only crude geometry. That´s nothin´you need a cad software, you just need to take some nice coloured wooden building blocks ;-)
I bet that I can also force down the performance of SW with only one single complex part of a consumer good, designed for injection molding.
And that´s real frustrating to me to see that SW still can´t handle complex geometry, surface-tangencies and precise predictable spline behavior in an acceptable and efficient way.
Not to mention all further shortcomings of SW: bug legacies reaching back to
2001+, painful instalation, the lack of stability, altered geoetry, redundant gadgets, decreasing quality while price is steadily increasing ....just my 2cents of a non machine design guy
happy flaming ;-)
JoJo
Hmm. It does work for me, all the time. This is how I do some hydraulic cylinders, as flexible subs. I wonder what I'm doing differently.
JoJo,
Guess you never tried a machined project for real men like say an eight cyllinder internal combustion engine. With all the castings and forgings you have the worst of both worlds, complex geometry, drafts and fillets galore and lots of parts. Isn't just the ID guys that do complex.
TOP
PS You haven't lived till you've done a watercooled cylinder head casting.
Ok, the BOM issue has been pretty well thrashed, I think. About the weldments: It sounds like you have a raw weldment with in-context features to the assembly. The raw weldment is inserted into the machined part file, which also has features in-context to the same assembly? Ouch. Every rebuild of the assembly rebuilds the in-context raw weldment, and finished weldment, then marks the finished weldment as needing a requild? Or does it begin another round of assembly rebuild to bring the machined weldment up to date? Either way, that sounds like some nasty multipass rebuilding there, and a great change for circular refernces to sneak in.
Is there a better way? I'm thinking... Would your document process allow this: Do the whole weldment in raw and finished configurations of the same part. Insert the weldment configuration into a blank part file to satisfy the filing system. That would get the weldment done in one rebuild pass on the assembly, vs. two or more. The raw weldment would only get rebuilt when working on the drawing.
I can't help with drawings of weldments. Last I checked, that just sucked, no matter how it compares to the competition. There's a lot of room for improvement there. Welds... don't get me started on weld models and annotations.
I'm not sure I correctly grasp your weldments situation, but I hope I at least gave you an idea or two for making things incrementally better. It's a constant struggle, figuring out how to structure parts and assemblies to achieve efficient rebuilds. Some say that we shouldn't have to be thinking about this. I'm not sure I agree. All tools have right and wrong ways to be used. The tools in CAD systems are no different on that point.
Having said all that, we know from other systems that SW could be faster by quite a large margin. I totally get being frustrated with that. There's a lot that could be done, and not much sign of progress.
Any chance you could provide such a thing as another modeling challenge? It would be an interesting part, and probably the subject of a lot of fruitful discussion. I'm not sure how to specify what we would all be working towards in such a way as to isolate modeling issues from casting design issues. Perhaps a drawing of a crude prismatic finished part to be made into a realistic cast part? Specifying draft angles, corner radii and parting line should nail it down pretty well. Perhaps it would have to be a series of challenges.
Dale, you wrote " Do the whole weldment in raw and finished configurations of the same part. Insert the weldment configuration into a blank part file to satisfy the filing system. " That is exactly what I'm doing. I'm not inserting weldment parts into an assembly I'm creating a weldment part file and inserting it into another part file to machine. I would never do weldments as incontext assemblies, way too slow for SW.
I'm not sure I know what you mean. I use hydraulic cylinders as flexible subs too. If I have other parts then I want them to display in the BOM as individual items and the cyl to be an individual item as well. I haven't had any success using dummy subs as was illustrated by someone else.
Straight from a colleague who switched to ProE from SW and is working with other designers that also had SW experience prior to ProE. Take it for what it's worth.....
......Solidworks users and prefer it (ProE) based on stability and large assy performance. The downside is the interface and menus are weak compared to SW and the time to get up and productive is definitely longer. Also, I've personally found reseller support lacking.
So, it basically corroborates what I was saying. SW has better vendor network and is certainly easier to use by from a purely technical standpoint ProE is more stable and faster. Speed and lack of flaky bugs would be the most important thing to me, that may vary for each of you so draw your own conclusions.
End of rant.
I mean that I have the subassembly show as a single item in the BOM, which is set to parts only. The "do no show child components in BOM..." setting does this for me without any trouble.
Are both the raw and machined weldments in-context to the assembly?
Solidworks has retention because of market share? Pro-E had about a ten year headstart into the market over Solidworks. Solidworks is a better solution for many, alltough you have a point about large assemblies.
SolidWorks got where it is because it offered better value in the late
90s up to now than IDEAS, Unigraphics, ProE or Catia, with customers finding SWks usable at a good price.Gut feel says that any very successful product must travel well on word of mouth, & SolidWorks has had that because it offered a moderate level of ability for fewer dollars than the other 4 packages above. Swks also outplaced the "Inventors" in their lower dollar catagory.
CAD is just a tool, and even the high end CAD packages are not particularly pricey compared to the price of good designers and the work that has to be done.
Any time a CAD user says "SolidWorks Sucks", he has a choice of what he can move to for a higher end CAD package. It is a free market.
Perhaps I could start with a VW cylinder head. I have some laying around somewhere. The problem is getting definition on the intake and exhaust tracts as well as the combustion chamber shape. I could probably provide photographs and key dimensions as a starting point.
TOP
"TOP" wrote in news:1175954459.692248.184080 @q75g2000hsh.googlegroups.com:
That sounds interesing.
How many would be willing to work through the challenge?
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