Applying shrinkage to a body using warp: is it equivalent to the shrinkage feature?
I am working to update a workflow to support designs specific to some variable manufacturing processes. To support this workflow accounting for growth/shrinkage of components in the design must be managed. To date I have used the mold design shrinkage feature on a part to change its size. This morphing reference part serves as a parent to other parts in the design.
Prior to Creo 7 I have managed this with the shrinkage feature and a notebook (formerly layout) to manage the relations controlling the interface of this reference model to dependent models in the design. It is worth all of the work to set this up to enable automated design updates but as one would imagine it is not trivial and takes quite some time to get it validated.
With the introduction of multibody modeling, I could potentially streamline this by getting rid of the notebook if I could scale a body in a part model. Shrinkage features cannot be applied to a body, so this begs the question is the warp transform scaling functionality really a substitute for a shrinkage feature.
A long time ago when warp was introduced as a function, I evaluated it and determined that it was a freeform styling function and not an engineering feature due to the lack of explicit control of parameters and geometry. I am not sure it has changed but I know some users have used the warp transform to scale a model and the warp can be applied to a body.
I would absolutely require true fidelity of geometry (i.e. topology, surface normals, surfaces within quilts) and internal feature ids to be maintained in the body post warp application. I do not think warp is capable of this. If anyone can offer observations on how warp behaves in the context of what I am asking I would appreciate hearing about your experience.

