What is the best way to turn an assembly into a solid part...

[MCGNX]

...with the interior etheir completely filled or removed. i.e., I only want the exterior surfaces and could care less about the internals.

NX505


Also would like this to be easy as possible, don't want to have to manually select all the exterior surfaces or anything like that. I've been playing with Simplify Assembly but can't seem to get it to work to my liking.


Thanks.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Have tried 'Linked Exterior'?

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.

 

[MCGNX]

Linked Exterior seems to work, though I would prefer to have the part filled solid.

Now here is my other question. When i do this, it creates the "linked exterior" as a line in my part navigator. What is the best way to create this as a seperate part?

What I thought was I could create a new part, add the assembly that I want to "link", then create the link and suppress or remove the assembly from the ANT. The first time I did this, it changed my linked exteriors. However, I just did this again and it worked. I did notice that removing the assembly actually broke the link, so I'm going to assume that suppressing the assembly is the correct way for now

 

[MCGNX]

Ok, so I believe I have found the best way to do it for the situation I want.

First I open the assembly I want to link the exteriors of, then I create a new component in that assembly that will be my envelope model. Then make that my work part, do the linked exteriors, then set the envelope model's ref set in my assembly to Empty.

Now I have a part that is nothing but the exteriors of my assembly, and since it is part of my assembly any updates to the assembly components that change the exterior are instantly applied.


This is the way I'm going to run with this unless someone comes in here and shows me a better way.