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Any way to select or delete parts which do NOT appear in an assembly?
joshtargo
Member Posts: 269 EDU
I am dealing with STEP assemblies containing about 900 parts, and they all appear in one part studio, and none of them have helpful names. I am slowly rebuilding the main assembly and many of the parts are duplicates and not needed. Is there any way to easily select or delete the parts which either ARE or ARE NOT in the assembly?
0
Answers
Before you do that, I wonder if there are better options for the original export. Presumably it doesn't have duplicate parts, but instances of the same part.
Otherwise, if you might be able to use "where used", but it's only available for Pro and Enterprise (not sure about EDU Enterprise).
Another thought, is use something like a property or color coding to track your progress. If you have 50 copies of the same screw and you're trying to change them to a single reference, color code the key part, and then you can quickly see in the assembly if you've gotten rid of the bad copies. Then you can delete all the bad copies in the part studio. You could also use renaming, or a property to help filter.
Not sure if any of that will really work. There are 900 parts at the center of a single part studio and they are all names Part1<1> etc. even if I change one screw to a different color, there's no way to select them all in the studio to delete them.
Is there possibly a trick with exporting a partial assembly or something that would cause the document to only export the parts needed to make that assembly?
Do you care that you are using the actual imported parts?
You could take your assembly with only what you need "resolved", then start a new in-context part studio and do a "copy in place" to create the parts you want to modify.
The downside is you would have to later replace the parts in your assembly with the ones you've created that way…
This is basically what I've ended up doing, but it's not ideal.
Actually, another option might be to go the BOM in your assembly and rename the parts to include something common or just give them all the same name…
Then you can go to the part studio and use the filter, then select them and hide, then launch a "delete" feature and box select everything left in the graphics area
I run into this a lot with pcba's, where I do want to control what I want to keep, and what I want to discard, so importing as a composite part does not work for me in those cases.
Out of lets say 500 pcb parts, there might only be 20 I actually want to keep. I will hide the ones I want to keep. These are easy to select from the graphics window (not the parts list), because they are usually all the big stuff. After a few minutes of carefully picking parts to hide, all that is left on the screen are the junk parts I don't want. Make a big box around them all, then press the delete part feature.
Now all that is left in the part tree are the stuff you want, and you can rename them there (or make a composite part, etc).
this is the worst case scenario and the last thing on my list of things to try. the parts are not always larger or visible in the studio, I would need to individually hide hundreds of pieces to make sure i don't hide the stuff i want to keep.
Yes, it sometimes is like that for me too. What I do in those cases is do the delete part in a few separate delete part features. This way I can get most of them at first (the easy ones). Then show all parts again, and repeat the process a couple more times until I get them all. Going back and editing the initial delete part is too difficult, since you run into the "what do I pick" again.
"center of a single part studio"
Are the parts coming in at their correct orientations, or are they all on top of each other? If the latter, start over, and change your import to "combine to a single part studio" the option on the right in the import window.
Did you try the rename from BOM and then using the filtering in the part studio approach I mentioned above?
@eric_pesty yes, I did try your suggestion, and yes, it does help me filter/differentiate parts in the studio after more-easily selecting them in the assembly.
I also tried @nick_papageorge073 suggestion of importing all parts into one part studio. This resulted in more parts (2200 instead of 900), but they are all in the correct position in model space, so it makes it easier to select them.
Now, what's the proper way to get those parts all by themselves in a way that allows me to work with them without lag?
I saved a version of the original document and then Derived them into a new document, but the regen time for 14 simple parts is 17.47s.
Do I need to export these by themself as parasolid and then import that into a new doc?