Feature overload in parts slows regeneration

tony_gent

When working in parts the feature numbers gets very high when doing a lot of redesign and slows regeneration down. When you duplicate all the features go into the new parts. Is there a way that you copy the parts into a new parts document and drop the features?

I find I can cheat achieving this with an export and then reimporting. This seems a bit of a rave to do but it works. Am I missing something in the program.

S1mon

To some degree this is a matter of philosophy of CAD.

Erasing history is standard practice at Apple with NX. Basically they have a special button that takes whatever parametric history was created during the course of modeling, and just gets rid of it. As someone who's spent their career doing parametric CAD in Pro/E, Solidworks and Onshape, it seems weird to throw away design intent by doing this.

Without seeing the models you're working on and understanding how they will be used over time, it's hard to truly advise. However if you find yourself adding a hole and then filling it in, or adding an extruded protrusion, and then cutting it off - you are likely doing it "wrong". The whole point of parametric modeling is to capture design intent and make it easy to modify by changing dimensions. It's also to drive relationships between parts in an intelligent way. If you are always adding features at the end of the feature tree and never going back and editing/removing/reordering/inserting in the middle of the tree - you are definitely doing it "wrong".

NeilCooke

That reminds me of the days when I first worked at PTC on Pro/ENGINEER - a customer was complaining about regen times. When I looked at their 1000+ feature model I soon discovered that every 100 features they were sketching a box around the entire model and removing all the geometry and starting again. 

S1mon

@NeilCooke
I don't know if I've seen anything quite that blatant, but I've definitely seen similar models where geometry is added and then filled in or cut away only to be recreated in an alternate way which could have just been an edit. 

NeilCooke

To be fair that was before SolidWorks hit the market and parametric feature-based modelling was unique to Pro/E. Showing my age here. 

S1mon

@NeilCooke
I started 3D CAD when Pro/E V6.0 had just been released (~1991). 

NeilCooke

UG v8.0 for me then Pro/E v11.0

eric_pesty

To answer the @tony_gent 's question/concern, you can pretty much achieve that by deriving your part into a new part studio, just have to make sure you are deriving a version for best performance.
I have actually done this for on some injection molded parts where I model the rough shapes of multiple parts that fit together in a part studio and then derive each one in a separate part studio to add fillets and small details that really increase the rebuild times.