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weldments and in-context troubles

Hi all,

I've gotten myself into a bit of a corner with a project (due soon of course!). It's a lot of SS and glass and a perfect application as a weldment - so I modelled the whole thing as a weldment not realizing at the beginning that the body count would get too high causing SW to slow to crawl. I ended up with 929 bodies in the weldment - the part was unusable it was so slow.

So, I started over (had revisions in any case) as an assembly, inserting a lot of empty parts into the assm fixed to the assemblies default plans, then geometry created in-context. This project sort of demands either in-context modelling or a massive skeleton sketch to establish all of the intersections.

Everything was going well in the assembly, nearly finished when I encountered 2 major difficulties: First, sketch geometry that is set to construction and 'at the intersection of 2 faces' continually is un- checking the construction switch, causing lot's of errors - editing the sketch and rechecking construction fixes it but only until the next rebuild.

Second, at some point I ended up with a bunch of parts with rebuild icons that will not clear - I'm pretty certain I don't have recursive in-context relationships but these rebuilds wont clear at all.

Is there some diagnosis for understanding these non-clearing rebuilds?

TIA

Zander

Reply to
Zander
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My guess as to why the construction geometry is being switched off is this: Since the intersections are incontext they are being recalculated each time you rebuild the assembly and therefore by default are not construction. If this is so, then by the same token you are always going to have rebuild icons.

Try locking external refs after you are done with a section of your assembly. That may well confirm my hypothesis.

TOP

Reply to
TOP

I'm with TOP - It sounds to me like the 'at intersection' is being remade every rebuild. If you are finding the intersection of simple planar faces, you might try removing the 'at intersection' and instead just piercing the endpoints of the construction line to edges/sketches/ etc of the referenced component (or in a 3D sketch, make the line or endpoitns of the line 'on surface' to both planar faces). If the surfaces are not planar, you might have more robust results from making a surface out of one faces and using the other face as a trim tool to get the 3D curve you need - it is an unfortunate step, but it is a LOT more stable than intersection curves, as you have found out.

How many of your components are in subassemblies? I am seeing much less of the persistent rebuild icon since I have become a zealot about subassemblies. I want as little to solve in the top level asm as possible - mates, in-context, you name it. Granted, I might have also changed something else in my methodology that makes the persistent rebuild icons go away and the subassemblies are just a red-herring, but my gut thinks it helped.

Anyway, good luck and hope this is helpful in some way. Ed

BTW - good to meet you at SWx world. I tried sending an email to you last Monday or Tuesday about that session I couldn't go to, but the email got rejected by your server.

Reply to
Edward T Eaton

Hi,

I've solved most of my rebuild issues by transfering most incontext information to a skeleton part. Interestingly the only persistant rebuild icons I'm gettings are on mirrored parts that are mirrored in the part file (pick a face, select 'mirror part' saveas new name etc.). The mirrors that are in the assembly always want a rebuild whereas the parents are fine. I note that if I mirror the part at the assembly level, letting it save a new file then these do not have persistant rebuilds.

It's a project that originally was a weldment but when I finished it as a weldment (all stainless steel pieces) the performance got so bad that the part has it's own spr now (SPR 363824) . Ultimately I could have split it into several smaller weldments but then half of the parts changed to sheet metal as a last minute design change.

Not sure what's up with the email? It was great to meet you as well. Try emailing to my comp.cad address (gmail) and I'll follow up from there.

Zander

Reply to
Zander

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