Continue to Site

Eng-Tips is the largest engineering community on the Internet

Intelligent Work Forums for Engineering Professionals

  • Congratulations cowski on being selected by the Eng-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

NX8.0 Modeling within Assembly - trouble finding correct .def file

Status
Not open for further replies.

JNieman

Aerospace
Mar 26, 2014
1,128
New member here. 'Engineer' at a Precision Manufacturing Job Shop focusing on tool&die, aerospace, defense, medical, and a whole lot of stuff that are either too hard or too much of a pain for other manufacturers to handle.

I'm a bit green at NX, we're using NX8.0, soon to upgrade to NX9, I hear. I have a pretty wide background in different CAD software, 'traditional' and parametric, and reached a pretty extensive 'mastery' level in some packages. However, I'm self-teaching NX on-the-fly.

I'm trying to continue getting better, faster, smarter, more automated with my die design assemblies, and I'm finding the "top-down" assembly approach difficult. It's what's most intuitive to me, as well, unfortunately. It makes sense to start with a die set, start placing die blocks and punches and not the other way around. I usually have a die design in mind before I start modeling.

Anyways, a lot of the guides/tutorials/lessons I am able to search up via google-fu are for older versions of UG/NX, I believe, as I cannot find "ug_english.def" anywhere, and it seems imperative to ensure "Assemblies_AllowInterpart" is set to "yes" in UG_english.def.... as it is, I don't believe I can create new component parts referencing existing geometry of OTHER component parts in an assembly. It's possible I'm going about this incorrectly so I'm open to correction.

Also, if there's a decent "rule of thumb" or "reference" for which parameters are in which .def file, and where (using default installation directories obviously) I'd love to know. It's teach me to fish for myself, instead of giving me a fish, and I've spent the last half hour scouring my hard drive for the appropriate file, already, to no avail.

Thank you very much.
 
Replies continue below

Recommended for you

Hello Mr. Nieman,

Are you sure you're starting your NX session with this def file?
It could be that you have to search for the ug_metric.def
Typicaly thes type of files can be found in the UGII folder, this should be a folder in your NX installation folder structure.


Another option:
If you are working in a multi user environment, this definition file can also be placed in a common shared netwerkfolder.
And it is removed by the admin on your computer.

Kind regards,

 
Mr Nieman,

It looks like this def file is not used anymore (since NX5)
So I hope somebody can help you further with this



 
Mr Nieman,

Just found, that this option has to be set in the Customer defaults file.
Go to
->file->Utilities->Customer defaults
Then click the "binocular" for a search on AllowInterpart, and you should be guided to set this option.


 
Ah! I was afraid that was it. Some of the guides/lessons I find are for very-many-previous versions, and I was thinking that might be the problem. I'm familiar with modifying customer defaults but I did not think at all to search there!

Thank you very much for the tip. And it is a local, 'standalone' (if that's the term Siemens uses) installation, so I knew it should be on my hard drive. But yes, I've found this in Customer Defaults and changed it accordingly! Thank you, again.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor