What's your biggest model ever?

Ever use the "cross your fingers and pray" regeneration method?

I just finished the biggest model I've ever done. Just shy of 1000
features (nope, not a bunch of patterned features, and not a bunch of
holes etc) the majority of the features are VSS and surface by
boundary. Very large injection molded part with shut offs, flow
channels and lots of details; gated in about 18 places with gas
assist. Mostly a symmetric design, somewhere around feature 800 I had
to do the mirror and merge thing and a solidification test which is
where I found myself doing the "come on baby" chant and it occurred to
me how absurd this part of the job can be (I mean, come on, how often
does a grown man cross his fingers?), so I thought I'd post about it
for the humor.

Turned out well. Only one geom check error (tiny edge) on a model
without hardly a single straight or flat surface in it.

Anybody here working on anything cool?

 

Ever use the "cross your fingers and pray" regeneration method?

I just finished the biggest model I've ever done. Just shy of 1000
features (nope, not a bunch of patterned features, and not a bunch of
holes etc) the majority of the features are VSS and surface by
boundary. Very large injection molded part with shut offs, flow
channels and lots of details; gated in about 18 places with gas
assist. Mostly a symmetric design, somewhere around feature 800 I had
to do the mirror and merge thing and a solidification test which is
where I found myself doing the "come on baby" chant and it occurred to
me how absurd this part of the job can be (I mean, come on, how often
does a grown man cross his fingers?), so I thought I'd post about it
for the humor.

Turned out well. Only one geom check error (tiny edge) on a model
without hardly a single straight or flat surface in it.

Anybody here working on anything cool?

I think, when I get really, seriously bored, I turn a job into much more than it was intended to be (so it turns out to be a learning experience for me) and, so, for those around who're interested.

Recently, they asked me to make 57 cable connections in a 19" rack (something I know/knew absolutely nothing about). When it came to the cables (and witnessing a growing number of circular references from cheap version of top-down modeling), I decided on trying a cabling skeleton model. To this, I added enough geometry for cable routing and about 120 terminations for about 57 cables (some had multiple terninations.)

On each ternination, I created a publish geom (at the component level or at the assembly level with Activate). Each consisted of a point, an axis and a surface. These component features were copied into the skeleton by activating the skeleton in the top level assembly adn then doing 'Insert>Shared Data>Copy Geom' and picking the 'Publish Geom' menu item, then picking a component's Pub_Geom feature, MM 'Accept', adding it to the skeleton reference geometry. When I also used the skeleton csys to quickly assemble the 57 cables, I merely needed to reference, one cable at a time, the skeleton geometry that would locate and guide the cable path. Not a circular reference in the bunch and several moved components with no loss of cable reference (screwy supporting geometry, but nothing worse). This was my trial by fire on skeleton models, in a big way, for this type of work and it came out OK, not the nail biter you describe, Polymer Man, but, still, on a local pioneer path and one that the natives are still gawking at (and hopefully learning from by breaking out of comfortable, safe little boxes).

Pioneer and teacher, ever and always, may we all be so lucky,
David Janes

 

The first ProE model I ever did, back in 1996, had over 1000 features.
Of course that was because I didn't have a clue. If I did it today it
would have about 200.

 

I am using proE for about a year now so I'm in a "clueless" period by your
words. I can't remember anything spectacular to decribe here but I have
something to ask you about model size.

Recently I worked on a mechanism containing cca 100 parts. It was only few
weeks after my company (company I work for) got MDX licence. One day my
assembly file was about 45Mb. Then I started to remove parts from that
assembly to see where is the problem. I finished with an empty assembly
containing only three planes and one coordinate system. The size was the
same...

And that happens to me all the time. Do you have any idea what could that
be? I deleted everything I touched...

 

No idea, sorry. I'm not sure what MDX is.

 

MDX = Mechanism Design Extension

PTC - copy/paste
Mechanism Design Extension (MDX) - lets users build, move, and animate the
kinematic movement of a mechanism as a natural part of the Pro/ENGINEER
design process and workflow. MDX also provides interference detection and
space claim envelope generation. MDX provides easy-to-use tools for the
capture and manipulation of multiple mechanism configuration states and
provides access to these configurations during drawing creation.

 

Ask me a question about plastic or surface modeling. But MDX? Sorry,
can't help you. Do you have suppressed features, especially suppressed
assembly level cuts?

Not really related (this isn't your problem), but did you know that
your view display settings when you save has an effect on the file
size?

For example, the model I was just discussing is 97 MB when saved at
shade quality 10 , but only 88 MB when saved at 1.

But, that same file, with every feature suppressed (still there, just
suppressed) is only 5.6 MB.

 

Ask me a question about plastic or surface modeling. But MDX? Sorry,
can't help you. Do you have suppressed features, especially suppressed
assembly level cuts?

Not really related (this isn't your problem), but did you know that
your view display settings when you save has an effect on the file
size?

For example, the model I was just discussing is 97 MB when saved at
shade quality 10 , but only 88 MB when saved at 1.

But, that same file, with every feature suppressed (still there, just
suppressed) is only 5.6 MB.


Yeah, there are other things that can affect saved model size. Try setting the config option save_model_display to shading_low (this setting lets you see a shaded model with Product View or PVX, such as Intralink 'Information' or Pro/e 'Preview'. This may be saved even after all the geometry has been erased. Try to regen after all deletions and save again.

David Janes