Delete Bodies??

Looking at some of the beautiful models some of the people on this NG
are sharing, (thanks!!!, you know who you are), I am curious as to if
anybody has any best practices regarding the "extra" surfaces that often
result.

I just think the Delete Body feature should be used more to get rid of
these construction surfaces as soon as they are no longer needed,
instead of just hiding them. This, IMO, would make the model easier to
reverse engineer and understand.

Anyone tried this?

 

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

 

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