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Multi Body Part

richgilleland

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For all of you who dislike Solidworks, i am sorry. But, does Proe have an option to build "Multi Body Parts" similar to Solisworks, or will there be an option in the future. Say what you will about SW but this really is a great way to build/model welded assy complete with cut list and BOM.

Thanks for your time and again I am SORRY.

Rich
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If I were you I would forget about it untill PTC get rid of its Granite and develop fresh new kernel instead.

To not extand this topic further - there is a way to emulate Multi Body Parts inside Pro/E model mode - use hybrid modeling: surfaces + solids.
 
Ha... Im teaching a workshop @google this week (today is the last day) and that topic came up yesterday at lunch (breakfast lunch and dinner is free there)

Surfaces (before it is solidified) is the same workflow. Interesting concept tho and I like it. Catia works the same way.

"I love Solidworks, it get paid by the hour and it takes me longer to get the project done"
 
Rich, on the topic of welded assemblies, the best way to
model that, or for that matter, anything, is to model it
as you would build it. Clearly a welded assembly is an
ASSEMBLY and not a single part, and thus should be
treated as such. Bills of materials and cut lists are
very easy to create in Pro/E from the assembly.
Rule of thumb for pro/e is to do things as closely as
possible to the real world as possible. The software
likes that approach best, and that makes it easiest to
change things down the road. I have worked on both
software packages, and although SW might seem faster at
the start, you almost always end up spending way more
time trying to modify things later. Hence Bart's comment
about being paid by the hour. Hands down, Pro/e is a
much more robust package, and if used correctly will save
you lots of time and work over the life of a project.
 
If you build the parts as true individuals you will never be able to keep track of and manage major shape changes with speed. When parts have intimate organic mating geometry you will become frustrated at the amount or rework.

You will need AAX or to come up with some workarounds that will add complexity.
10K foot view of the process.
Make the body either in surface form or solid. (shelled)
Use cutting surface(s) and quilts to chop off what you don't want for each part.
Use inheritance, copy geometry and or a skeleton to keep it all linked together and mating properly. With Pro-E there are multiple approaches to skinning this cat. I am still learning how to do this elegantly. My only issue is how to break the parent child relationship and then get it back for documentation maintenance purposes. What I have found is that you can truly design anything if you work hard enough, be it with SW or WF.
If you think SW is slow compared to WF you may have a warped sense of reality.
Once you're done learning how to configure WF and understand what not to do I could say it is an even fight... but out of the box with two new users SW will wipe the floor with WF. With an experienced user WF is the clear winner for now. I am thinking Creo will change that. Just an opinion. Now that I kicked the hornets nest You may all start to sting.
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Chris
 
As a long time Pro/E user going way back to release 18, I would take Solidworks any day. Not having multi-body functionality in Pro/E is a real handicap. And the upgrade to Creo (a corporate mandate), is a step backwards which we have been struggling with for the last 3 months.
Edited by: dmm1
 
dmm1 said:
As a long time Pro/E user going way back to release 18, I would take Solidworks any day. Not having multi-body functionality in Pro/E is a real handicap. And the upgrade to Creo (a corporate mandate), is a step backwards which we have been struggling with for the last 3 months.

What issues are you struggling with? We are currently using WF4 and are thinking about rolling upto Creo 1 or 2. I've been using Creo 1 for some projects here to test drive it.
 
Mistake #1 was upgrading to Creo 1 -- lots of bugs. Problem compounded by upgrading from Intralink to Windchill (#2), which is cloud based. Now every time you need to pull a file from the Windchill "cabinet" takes a coffee break. Our pdmlink server is across the country (#3), so if server goes down due to Sandy, you're out of luck.


Family table in Creo/Windchill causes numerous check-in/out issues. "Add to workspace" causes the part to be checked out (as shown from other's system) but does not show as checked out in my own workspace.


And the "event manager" is completely useless. On and on and on. ..
 
dmm1 said:
Mistake #1 was upgrading to Creo 1 -- lots of bugs. Problem compounded by upgrading from Intralink to Windchill (#2), which is cloud based. Now every time you need to pull a file from the Windchill "cabinet" takes a coffee break. Our pdmlink server is across the country (#3), so if server goes down due to Sandy, you're out of luck.


Family table in Creo/Windchill causes numerous check-in/out issues. "Add to workspace" causes the part to be checked out (as shown from other's system) but does not show as checked out in my own workspace.


And the "event manager" is completely useless. On and on and on. ..





so still.....besides your problem with windchill, whats the benefit in solidworks over Creo or Pro/E ?


//Tobias
 
data management, specially revision history recording is a pain to everybody who switches from single, local HDD way of storing the data to something such sophisticated as PDMLink is. Add to this Fammilyt tables with internal instances and you are lost in the forest(keep away from FT if you play with PDMLink!)

Lots of things seems to be dumb to say at least, but these are pros and cons of advanced data managment. In example, if there is relation in top assembly which referes to a part, while regeneration of this assembly part is changed and recieves "plus" in the session name which means it was changed. Forget about saving an assembly while Pro/E will scream to check the part out. That is why Flexible component tool was developed(this is my opinion).

I doubt other(SW, UG, and so forth) deal with this in less dificult way.
 
We moved to PDMLink/Windchill 9.1 a little over a year ago and trying to re-learn how to do
things coming from a Folder/File based storage. The Family Table thing
is definitely an issue. I've set-up all the Engineers here with a
regular user profile and an Admin user profile to give them temporary
admin powers to delete back to a Production Release level for times when
the Family Table issue causes problems. Exporting/backing up your work
locally then having to re-import once the issues have been resolved is a
work around, although it shouldn't need to be. Lots of these issues haven't
been fixed in the latest Windchill 10.1 either which we are updating to next year for better serializing of tasks in Change Notices and other user interface benefits.

I've been using
Creo 1 for small projects here and there are lots of Pros on the
modeling side. The Drafting side takes some getting used. My ALT key
is going to wear out prematurely probably due to the drafting side of
things.






Edited by: jsantangelo
 

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