The role of .CGRs within Enovia VPM & Portal 3D com

[Arkangel]

Good Day, All.

We are looking at implementing Enovia VPM and Portal 3Dcom to manage our v5 & v4 data. We are unsure as to how these two applications handle .CGRs. Is it possible to store .models and .CATParts with these two and have them automatically generate .CGRs? Conversely, when checking out .models and .CATParts, especially with large .CATProducts, will you be able to receive the .CGRs and be able to go into Design Mode at will?

We'd like to know if VPM and Portal are viable systems for large assemblies where it is desirable to work with .CGRs.

 

[whitlabell]

Hello Arkangel,
Let me start by saying that we do not use VPM here, but we do have a large (600+) deployment of 3Dcom.
As far as 3Dcom is concerned, the "native" 3D format of the viewers is HCG (highly compressed graphic) format. It can use a CGR to create this much faster than from a CATPart or .model file. Whenever you select a 3D viewer, the 3Dcom server code will create a cgr for the file if it cannot find an existing one in any of the cache locations defined for your setup (using CATOptionsMgt for the V5 server, and the CATN4D_CACHE variable for catia V4).
What we have done here is to point the 3Dcom server at our production CATIA V5 cgr cache. This cache is updated from our database at 20 minute intervals to ensure that the contents are up to date. The performance improvement is orders of magnitude better than without the CGR cache.

In terms of building large assemblies, again we don't use VPM - but we have implemented a custom method of accessing our Optegra product structure trees from 3Dcom and have users who regularly load 150-500 instances into 3D local viewer sessions without much trouble (Skin panel assemblies etc.). The PC's are typically Compaq P3 600's with 128Mb - 512Mb ram and crappy graphics. The amount of memory on the client directly affects the number of instances you can work with. I can give you more detailed tips if you need them...

 

[Arkangel]

Whitlabell,

Any information you can provide would be helpful. We are in the midst of making a determination as to whether VPM & 3d com will work for us, in particular with large assemblies. What do you have?

 

[whitlabell]

Hello,
Most of the assemblies that we would view would be the likes of fuselage skin panel assemblies, floor structure assemblies and systems clipping and routing models. As I said before, the amount of memory on the client directly affects how many instances you can load - so we coud load 500 models of cleats and AGS items into a 3D local viewer; but maybe only 140 models of stringers, frames and the skin panel. You can optimise the CGR's for size by switching off the "save lineic elements in the cache" option on the server and playing with the SAG values on the server. Another point to note is that we have found that CGR files produced with the CATIA V5 server are approx. 30% bigger than those created with the CATIA V4 server. The best advice I can give is for you to try it with your setup and parts and see what you think. But it works for us, and has allowed our methods people to create illustrated process plans using their normal PC, instead of a 4D nav workstation.

some problems that we have found include:
1. If you have a model file loaded that contains lots of AGS models, and you only want to see some of the AGS instances, you have to manually right-click on each AGS model and choose the "hide element" option. Very laborious for clipping runs.
2. If you move some of the models to perform an exploded view,the "Hidden line removal" function shows the models in their original position.
3. You cannot copy the current screen view straight to the clipboard like you can with 2D viewers. You have to perform a snapshot and then save the JPEG image from that to disk before opening it into powerpoint or similar. (IE has a bug that prevents a copy/paste being performed on the JPEG).

A very good guy to talk to in IBM UK is John Lawrie, email: lawrieJ<at>uk.ibm.com - or Paul Manton email: paul_manton<at>uk.ibm.com for techie stuff. Both these guys are very helpful, and have a lot of experience of 3Dcom via VPM.
I can email you some screenshots of assemblies that our Users have created if you like.

Finally, I would like to restate that we do not use VPM here, so there might be extra functionality (and bugs) that we do not know about. And.. Don't expect Dassault to be too helpful when you submit any APAR's - they seems to label all bugs relating to 3Dcom as a &quot;permanent restriction&quot; these days.

Hope this helps,
Gary.

 

[Arkangel]

whitlabell,

You have been most helpful. Yes, I would love to have some of the screenshots of your assemblies that you mentioned. Please email them to me at kpatterson@sikorsky.com. We work with large assemblies, too, and I find this all very beneficial.

 

[whitlabell]

Email is on it's way!

 

[steevans]

In VPM you can activate the X-CAD server to generate .CGR and .Model representations for a CATPart directly in the database. You can also generate space maps and bounding boxes for spacial queries. The X-Cad server is very powerful and has many options and deployement variables. This is part of the Multi Cad tools. It works with virtually any type of CAD data. UG, Pro-E, CATIA V4, CATIA V5, PDF, Autocad .....
We use this for thousands and thousands of parts.

Search for X-Cad in the VPM admin gudie for details.

Stefan

 

[Arkangel]

Thanks!