Continue to Site

Welcome to MCAD Central

Join our MCAD Central community forums, the largest resource for MCAD (Mechanical Computer-Aided Design) professionals, including files, forums, jobs, articles, calendar, and more.

Handling Large Assembly Models

colinsvjacob

New member
An assembly model consists of 'heavy and detailed' components and 'simple' components. Now, when there is a need to modify the 'simple' components, it takes hours for the model to regenerate. In this context, the following question arises: How can one make changes to the simple components in a quicker way in Creo? The primary requirement to this process is that the references to the actual large components needs to be maintained, thus, options such as 'Shrinkwrap' is eliminated.

P.S.: The following options are know and practiced, but to little help.
1. Creating Simplified Reps of the complex components and using them in the Assembly.
2. Creating Publish Geometries of the surfaces and using them in the Assembly.

Thanks,
Colins Jacob
 
Looks like you have the basics covered. It's hard to tell if you are using them to their fullest potential. In the mid 90's I was working with super large assemblies (so big, PTC would consult with us on the topic of large assembly management), given the computing power of the time, we managed. Granted, nothing was easy. But the fact it's taking hours, I'm guessing you are either using slow/il-configured computers or some of the config settings are not set for optimal speed, or poor modeling techniques.

If you are maxing out your RAM, I can see that as a huge reason for the slowness. PC's don't do well when it comes to memory swapping. Look at your computer configuration, do a search on config settings for large assembly speed. I'd tell you those, but it's a been a while since I had to worry about that.

I would also look into using skeletons, so you don't have to make references to other parts. If you have one part that references some other part that are many sub-assemblies away from each other, that part will need to load all that data to regenerate. If you are going to create external references, make sure they are from part to part, not done at an assembly level. Even a small assembly can easily be bogged down by the poor use of external references. Ask me how I know. I have to deal with models/assemblies done by our offices in China, and they don't care about creating clean models/assemblies.

Hope that helps.
 
Hello Victor-dot-com,

Your experience and knowledge seems to be vast. Thank you so much for your response. It looks as if I need to reconsider my modeling methodology as you have highlighted: taking references from parts to parts instead of assembly to part. (Would skeletons instead of external references help in maintaining dependencies?, I think else-wise.)

On towards the PC configuration front, I am working on a HP Z230 Tower Workstation with Intel(R) Xenon(R) CPU E3-1270 v3 @ 3.50GHz (64-bit); 32.0 GB RAM; NVIDIA Quadro K2000 Graphic Card with 5764 MB (Dedicated 2048 MB, Shared 3716 MB).

On towards the Creo configuration, I have not updated any attributes. Could you please provide me with details of the attributes (recommended and preferred) for large assemblies - those which would help in speed-up working with them?

Again, thank you so much for your help.

Regs,
 

Sponsor

Articles From 3DCAD World

Back
Top