Deformable sub-assembly

[icetea73]

Hi,

I'm trying to create an deformable sub-assembly in NX9 - without success unfortunately.
The assembly
- contains a component pattern that is controlled indirectly (measurements and expressions) by reference geometry that sits in the assembly
- that reference geometry is essentially two sheet bodys that bound the component pattern indirectly
- these two sheet bodys are defined as references when creating the deformable component feature.

When I use this assembly as a component in a main assemby and try to deform it by specifying two wave-linked faces of other components of the main assembly I get two error messages:
1. Message box: "Deform operation cannot complete because features copy has failed"
2. Message box after pressing ok: "Unable to deform due to a failure while copy and paste of a feature from deform definition"

Is there any way to dig deeper? Kind of an report on the operation?
Is it even possible to deform a part that actually is an assembly where the component positions are controlled by the deformation? I actually had to add a dummy body to the assembly because the deformable part dialog didn't finish at first complaining that there was no body in the part.

Thanks,
T.

 

[KhimaniMohiki]

when you deform a part in a higher assembly level it creates a deform feature at the assembly level then copies the features from the child part into it, so as your deformable part has child parts dependant on the features which you are deforming, i dont think they will update as the features they depend on would then live at the higher assembly level. Make sense?

I think you might be better off using an expression to control arrangements of the reference parts and the geometry.

Khimani Mohiki
Design Engineer - Aston Martin
NX8.5

 

[icetea73]

I'm not sure if I did understand you correctly but it seems that the situation is not quite the way you described. The only object that is deformed in the sub-assembly is a component pattern that is owned by that sub-assembly itself. The components in the sub-assembly are not deformed. So I don't think I'm trying to jump through levels.

Nevertheless your explanations did help me a lot in understanding the error messages: The component pattern I'm deforming is not actually a "part feature" in the usual sense so it can't be copied. I assume that I'm simply trying to do something that was not intended...

I will try a feature pattern with reference geometry as a deformable part or udf and then reference that deformed pattern in the main assembly for the placement of the parts with a feature pattern.

Thank you so far!