Uniting a very large array of cylinders

[Cradders]

Hello,

So, I've got a huge array of cylinders positioned in a 3D structure (Think 3D spider's web). I'm fairly confident that each cylinder touches its neighbours and so if I were to manually perform a series of Unions then I would get a single solid body out of it at the end. That would take far too long though! Is there any means within NX5.05 to achieve something like a 'Merge All' command available through some hidden-away menu, UDF or GRIP? As far as I'm aware, things must be selected in the correct order when Uniting multiple bodies, something which would be far too time-comsuming!

Cheers,

James

 

[JohnRBaker]

In NX 6 the order of selection is no longer as critical as before and the results, even if you select 2 or MORE Tool bodies, will always be a single Unite Feature. Now the actual complexity of the model will not be reduced all that much since the number of edges and faces will be the same as if it were being done in NX 5, but the structure of the model will be simpler and as I mentioned, the user no longer has to be as concerned about the order in which Tool Bodies are selected.

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.

 

[NXMold]

Make a thin solid "plate" behind the cylinders, unite all cylinders to an extracted copy of the plate (this way selection order will not create errors), then subtract the original plate.

NX 5.0.3.2 MoldWizard

 

[hudson888]

Depending on the nature of your structure the above suggestion may work.

Another idea is that if the web is basically regular in shape then it may be described as conical. If that were the case you can often create a portion, then you may need to group some of the features, but the idea is to instance the feature or the geometry so that you have the same result with fewer booleans. It is large numbers of booleans that take up a lot of time and memory in order to compute.

Cheers

Hudson

 

[Cradders]

Thanks for the tips. The nature of the structure means that the plate technique will not work, nor is it regular. The improvements to the Unite feature in NX6 sounds promising, I'll look forward to my organisation obtaining it.

Cheers