display drive path NX6 CAM

[benicki]

Moving from NX3, it seems like the 'display drive path' used in boundary ops has been replaced by 'preview', which is not the quick 'what's my toolpath look like?" button it used to be. It seems like preview takes just as long to generate as full generate does. I am trying to apply multiple different stepovers from a plane onto the part, and I need to see them without having to wait for the toolpath to generate.

Thanks,
Ben
Win XP 32 NX6

 

[Tingsryd]

Tingsryd (Industrial) Jul 28, 2010
Are you referring to "Display Selected Objects" in manufacturing preferences? If you are, displaying should never take as long as generating an operation. Operations can take slightly longer to display, or generate, when using spline, nurbs data with small intol/outtol settings such as .0001" or smaller. Smoothing will also affect this. I find that when generating a large operation, with small intol/outtol, with find cut step and smoothing turned on, that processing can take quite a bit longer and displaying the operations can be longer as well.

My issues were mostly alleviated when I upgraded my hardware. My old processor was old-school 3.2 xeon single core, I think with the old 800MHz front side bus, very old! My new computer is a quad xeon with 12GB or ram and a Quadro FX3800 graphics card. While not a top-end system it is quite a solid performer. Even mundane tasks such as setting the drafting style (hotkey S) while dimensioning has sped up greatly; it used to take 2-3 seconds to come up but now it is almost instant. Also, with multi cores and plenty of ram I regularly use parallel generate on everything I do.

This may not be the answer to your question or what you want to hear but this has been my experience. As for displaying selected objects automatically, I turned it off on my computer by default. I create many large operations and refer to them during my programming workflow so it consumes a lot of time. However, I turned it on for other workstations because their toolpaths tend to be smaller and it works quite well for their purposes.

Siemens is always adding new functionality to NX and sometimes it can cost computer resources. In the end it is always better to have options for the programmers and designers. The important thing is that you can usually chose whether to use many of the options to suit your needs and capabilities.

nx7
Windows7
Xeon 5520
Quadro FX3800
12GB ram

 

[benicki]

Thanks for the info.
I'm not real strong on my hardware knowledge, but it seems like it could be that more is going on in NX6, or it is using more resources. Similar toolpaths are taking 5-6 times longer to generate or preview than in NX3. Is this all hardware-based? Typical intol/outol for us is 0.001, but sometimes as low as 0.0001.

Thanks again!
Ben

 

[Tingsryd]

Every release there are more features added that take more resources. There really is no definite tipping point but I would recommend to do a side by side comparison with some faster hardware, just to get a feel where your hardware is at.

nx7
Windows7
Xeon 5520
Quadro FX3800
12GB ram