The extent of my CAD knowledge is really just my introductory university class and all the googling I've done on my own so far, so forgive me if I'm bringing up a concept that's already obvious to some. I help model for a college Formula SAE team and an issue that I've noticed so far is that many people are making references directly to part geometry, such as edges, faces, and points. The issue blows up when people adjust that round, or delete a face, add geometry, etc. etc., and it happens quite often given how fast Formula SAE teams iterate through designs. A way I thought up after sitting on this was to effectively "black box" communication between parts with a sort of datum layer sitting on top of the part model (or at the end of the part model, rather). All communication between parts would need to be handled through these datums, which are connected to the part geometries that the members would normally use. Effectively it's a sort of "buffer" between the part geometry and another part. When a design change is made that deletes a reference for the datum layer, the user would just disconnect the datum, float it around in free, space, make the change, and reattach the datum, thus never deleting the reference for another part. I figure this would be nice, because I don't need to ensure that everyone knows how to pick references from a list, or if they can even use Creo well.
Basically it takes the spaghetti references that we have now, and organizes it into a somewhat clearer hierarchy, since team members now also have to communicate about what links are being made. Additionally when one person updates their CAD, as long as they adjust their datums properly, the other person doesn't need to do anything; the design intent is preserved.
Is this already common in the real world? Is this something that people who use PDM's like Windchill have been doing for ages? We are also considering switching to Windchill, but I can't imagine how much worse the headache would get if references stayed the way they were on the team AND we had to pull things from a server to see full models
Basically it takes the spaghetti references that we have now, and organizes it into a somewhat clearer hierarchy, since team members now also have to communicate about what links are being made. Additionally when one person updates their CAD, as long as they adjust their datums properly, the other person doesn't need to do anything; the design intent is preserved.
Is this already common in the real world? Is this something that people who use PDM's like Windchill have been doing for ages? We are also considering switching to Windchill, but I can't imagine how much worse the headache would get if references stayed the way they were on the team AND we had to pull things from a server to see full models