Adam, I’ve got a situation where I’ve got about 70% of a car model completed, but there’s a tiny flaw in the car body. The car body is the first part of the model that I created, and the error is so minor that it would be unnoticeable in the final renderings. But being a perfectionist, I rolled back the history tree and corrected it. You can probably guess what happened next: when I rolled everything forward, the model self destructed. Apparently lots of things I’d done subsequent to the car body were somehow dependent on it, so fixing the tiny error in the body ruined everything else! Fortunately I’ve been saving the model incrementally, so all was not lost. What I want to know is whether there’s a way I can extract the repaired car body and insert it in the previous version of my model so that its X,Y,Z coordinates line up the way they should. I don’t want to have to manually re-position it, as that would be very difficult to do due to its precise fit.
This raises a general question I’ve had about SW models: is it possible to extract just a section of a single body or multi-body part file so that it can be reused in a new model? It seems that it should be, but I’m not sure how to go about it. In case my question isn’t clear, here’s an example. Suppose I already have a complete model of a revolver which I did as a part file, rather than as an assembly file. Now I want to do a model of a different revolver, but it’s one that just happens to use the same cylinder as my previous model. Rather than having to recreate the same cylinder, can I extract just that part from my previous model and use it in the new model?
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Hi Andrew!
Ah yes, we’ve all been there, my friend. Part of it can be gotten around using best practices, and part of it is unavoidable in SolidWorks (though in more robust packages this is less of an issue).
The answer to your question is yes: you can extract geometry from a given model to use in another part, and there are ways of achieving this while maintaining assiciativity, and ways to extract the geometry itself as dumb surfaces.
This, like many of the questions that have been coming up these days, really deserves a video. I’m planning to slam through a bunch of these next week. Hopefully I’ll get around to this one as well!
Adam
Hey Adam, right after I sent you that query, I discovered a neat little thing called ‘Save Bodies’, which does exactly what I was looking for. Doh! It’s one of those things that, never having needed it before, I just never looked for it.
After having beaten my head against a wall trying to fix what at first looked like such a simple problem, I did learn a couple of important things to avoid in future. One of them is that whenever I create a complex model, I need to make the various elements as independent from one another as possible, rather than employing the quicker but sloppier practice of building them from the existing geometry of other parts. (It’s surprising how parts of a model which appear to be geometrically unrelated nevertheless are!) That way, any changes I might make to a part won’t reverberate through the entire model.
The second thing is that if I create a surface model with the intention of turning it into a solid using the Thicken command, I have to be careful to avoid applying ALL the fillets to the surface model first. The Thicken command seems to have fits when it encounters very small fillets, especially in places where complex curves meet. Much better to create these fillets once the surfaces have been turned into solids.
By the way, do you ever find yourself solving problems in your sleep that you couldn’t solve while awake? A number of times recently I’ve woken up seeing clearly an elegant solution to a complex problem in geometry, but with no recollection at all of the steps my brain took to arrive at it. Very weird!
Andrew! Great lessons, all. In CATIA we used to talk about keeping your history tree ‘shallow and wide’, meaning that you want to avoid stacking references on top of each other (e.g. Edge 1 is dependent on Edge 2 is dependent on Face 1 is dependent on Face 2 etc etc etc). This is why I create so many datum (aka ‘Reference’) elements in my models: if I can constrain six things to a single plane, it helps keep those dependency stacks low.
As for the thicken command, another valuable lesson!! A general rule of thumb in CAD is ‘add your fillets LAST’. That one simple practice can save you endless hours of headache.
There’s an amazing Radiolab episode called Dreams that talks a bit about how this might work. As a kid I always found I learned things faster if I did them right before bed, and then again right when I woke up in the morning. Somehow sleeping on a problem really does have a way of helping to work it out!
Cheers!
Adam
Hey Adam, while I have you on the line ;-) what would be the simplest way to create the features shown below? The first is a row of what I’ll call ‘gill slit’ vents, which change in length:
[img]http://www.ultimatecarpage.com/images/large/872/Auto-Union-Type-C_14.jpg[/img]
I can create them by cutting their outlines through the car body and then using the Loft feature to created the indented portions of each slit, but this will take a lot of work. I don’t know if there’s a quicker way.
The second thing is the rows of holes drilled through each vertical element comprising the grille to the right of the photo. The image is a bit out of focus, but notice how all the holes line up horizontally:
[img]http://www.ultimatecarpage.com/images/large/872/Auto-Union-Type-C_9.jpg[/img]
Since the surface I used to create the grille is still in my model (set to invisible), one solution would be to offset this surface to where the center of those holes would be, then project horizontal lines onto that surface and use each of those lines as the path for a swept cut. This is a rather tedious process though, and I’m wondering whether there’s an easier way.
Bam!