Facet bodies driving me insane! (NX5)

[mpike]

Hi,

I have seen a few threads on facet bodies, but none of which have helped me, unfortunately.

I have large assemblies of components made up from parts from Ideas. I have exported the components into one part file, (for ease of manupulating without having to constantly change the work part) and now have ~14,000 facet bodies within that one part file.

Firstly, I assume the reason that they are all facet bodies is because they were imported from Ideas originally(?)

My problem is that I want to trim some of the bodies. As they are facet bodies this is not possible. I have tried using the various tools that are suggested in other threads ("Rapid Surfacing", "Refit Face") as well as exporting as IGES/STEP and even JT (in an attempt to use the "Extract Exact Data" command under File, Properties - which was greyed out) and also using "Extract Feature" underneath Insert, Facet Body. When trying to use any of these, it does not let me select any Facet Bodies, meaning that I can't do anything.

Please can somebody put me out of my mysery?!

Thanks

 

[Xwheelguy]

Were the bodies solids or facets in I-DEAS originally? What type of file was output from I-DEAS that you opened in NX (.stp, .igs, .stl, .x_t)?

I-DEAS and NX can Interoperate, meaning you can export I-DEAS data directly into NX, without losing any data (like you might with STEP or IGES). It's covered in the I-DEAS Documentation and walks you through the process.

I believe Interoperate was introduced in I-DEAS 11.

Tim Flater
Senior Designer
Enkei America, Inc.

http://www.enkei.com

Some people are like slinkies....they don't really have a purpose, but they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down the stairs.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Of course one can't help but ask how one will ever expect to work on an 'assembly' consisting of 14,000 of any type of body, faceted or otherwise.

I seriously recommend that you LEARN how to use NX assemblies as they were designed to be used, and learn this quickly before you get too many files created because someday you'll need to convert them to something a little more usable and it's not going to be pretty. Besides, I can't for the life of me think of ANYTHING that would be easy, all in the name of avoiding changing Work Parts, when working in a part file with 14,000 bodies.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
NX Design
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[mpike]

The reason my assembly is ~14,000 parts is because I have pretty much the entire rear end of a car open in it, as I try to package an entire fuel system in it. I don't need to edit all of the parts, I just need to see them so that I don't package a fuel line through a muffler, or similar. The components that I edit will then be exported back into an up revision of their original part files. I just find it extremely irritating to have to continually change the work part to make a small mod, and then change back to another part of the fuel system which is itself made up from >100 components. I've got no problem admitting its not the way you are taught to do it, but life would be awfully boring if the world consisted of people who all conformed to the norm!

When I took the parts over, they were already saved as NX part files, so I don't know how they were transfered out of Ideas or what type of body they were within Ideas. I don't have access to them to check either. I would imagine that they weren't designed in Ideas originally as they are supplier parts. They would have been imported into Ideas once they reached here, and potentially were imported as facet bodies. If this is the case, is there no way of modifying them?

 

[hudson888]

At the very least use Step214 and create yourself the assembly tree that you'd have inherited from I-deas. That way if and when you create faceted bodies they'll actually do something. Interoperability is even more likely to suceed in doing so.

I'd say you will need the solids to work with according to your description of what you wanted to do. Try using some wrapped assemblies where you can to lighten the load on the computer. For packaging work really need to work with assemblies perhaps using filters to exclude isolate those components that you don't need usually it turns out to be fewer than you would think, and when you have a proposal yiu can use open by proximity to check whether you have missed anything.