Shrinwrap...friend or foe?

[dlongmi]

All,


I started working with a new client that uses Shrinkwrap in some, uh...interestingways. Such as the first feature of models and then will use it as reference for subsequent features.


Personally I never used it becauseIthought other forms of reference and space claim models were better. Anyway...


What are your collective thoughts on this seemingly harmless feature?


How do you use it in a typical day?


TIA

 

[puppet]

if i have a big assembly and i want a copy of it in a layout. i use
shrinkwrap to make a simplified copy of my assembly and then use that
in the layout. saves heaps of loading time.



but dont really do it often.

 

[ankarl]

The only type of external ref's I prefer to use is either skeletons or merge features.
Shrinkwrap might be ok, doesnt feel good though.I would be suspicious as you are.


I use shrinkwraps mainly to kill proprietary information before sending it to customers. It also makes life easier managing large assemblys, eg. heavy machinery.

 

[slashct]

I worked with a company that had every module broken into space claims and interfaces. This is the way they found the best to manage and this was not using shrinkwraps, due to the fact that in the end they wanted the claim to be static and manageable (sounds stupid but...).
It seems harmless to use a shrinkwrap but if you make it associative and regenerate tha assy it comes from it updates and presto you can claim or remove some of your space. Believe it or not many people did this and thats why in the begining we ended up making a volume file and thats what we were to work in. We actually had 1 person managing these because of the size and complexity of the assemblies. In our main assembly we would put this volume and make sure we were inside this volume and critcial interfaces lined up this was a pain but it worked. Mind you these were assemblies with 20-30k components not including hardware.