It seems like Creo/Windchill would give a method for exposing mass properties or assigned Creo materials as more companies are trying to do tractability or sustainability calculations on the products they design. We'd like to have that info in Windchill as metadata for every part and I'd like to be able to grab it easily for every component in any assembly (ideally into an Excel BOM).
I'm running into several headaches trying to extract the material info that I was wondering if anyone had a better idea or setup for any of or all of these:
- To use the material or weights in the Windchill BOM export tools to Excel, all parameters need to be Designated to Windchill. The desired parameters are not always designated in our CAD models.
- The Creo BOM Export can be customized for give an exported BOM with material, part volume, and weights but I run into this problem:
- I added the hidden PTC_MATERIAL_NAME as a parameter to our start parts last Fall but we have decades or parts without that assigned material exposed. Is there way to expose the assigned material without having this turned on? I don't understand why this is hidden in the first place.
- Our part Volume and estimated weight parameters are driven by model tree analysis features with relations. Sometimes they're suppressed and/or not at the bottom of the tree (not calculating the full weight of the part). Our new start parts have these features in the Model Tree Footer to minimize this issue but that has only been around since last Fall. The only relations were hard coded to a specific unit system so switching unit systems calculates the wrong weight. The latest start part relations get around this by using units.
- I don't understand enough about the Mass Properties work to know if this would be a solution. Does it go through and recalculate the mass properties for the lower level parts? This would only give me the level weight and I need the info for every component.
Related, I don't know the difference between these mass property parameters... Alternate vs Reported Mass Properties.
Is there a simpler method? Trying to make sure everything is perfect to our latest standard in every single CAD model seems like quite the effort.
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We generally don't deal with huge assemblies. I could see how the mp_calc_level all_models could definitely slow down performance versus the default setting... I doubt we'd turn that on except temporarily to run a mapkey to figure out mass properties for an assembly if needed.
CHRISTOPHER REES It looks like you had quite the discussion earlier about trying to figure out basically how to do the same thing minus exporting the name of the assigned material and any kind of desire to get this info into Windchill. I'm confused about what you mean by it doesn't report out the part level... you can save the mass properties file as a txt file instead of the m_p format. This seems to give all the info displayed inside of Creo into the text file including part levels. Now if only I could get it to dump the assigned material also, choose the format to display on the fly (top level properties vs every part, choose to display the assigned units vs choose my own units/use the units of the current assembly, remove all the info i don't want, include other part parameters, etc.) and be able to export it to Excel with the values all separated. 
This all seems pretty easy for PTC to do but hard for us to do. Without including the assigned material in this export, it's pretty worthless for what I'm trying to do (sustainability calculations with percentages of each type of material, find which parts go to which type of suppliers, etc.). Here's a screenshot of creating a text file just make sure you add the .txt when saving.
I've been playing around with the custom format for the Creo BOM tool and I can get a dump that looks super close to what I think we both want. It gives both a flat summary of the assembly as well as a BOM with levels and I'm able to exact our other standard parameters such as description. The problem is that this method requires every part to have parameters for the hidden PTC_MATERIAL_NAME material and the desired mass properties. You have the make sure the mass properties are perfect inside every part which is a problem with a Windchill controlled environment where I can't change every component. I'd probably want to add other things like surface area, density, etc. as needed.
What I do is have a mapkey that opens up a drawing that has a repeat region on it. The user is prompted to pick an assembly. After the assembly has been picked the repeat region fills with all of the parameters for all of the components. From there, I export the repeat region to a text file. Then the assembly is opened up and file-> prepare -> model properties -> 
is performed with mp_calc_level all_models turned on.
Now I have to incomplete sets of data. One (repeat region) has all the parameters I need (Material, Description, State, etc.) and the other has the mass properties I need (Mass, Density, CG location). I then merge the two together and within my script I convert the units if different.
A perhaps easier way to do this is with one of the APIs, but the APIs require every system to be configured for them to be used and that is not something I have the luxury of controlling within my company.
My script is not something I can share and even if I could it could not be boiled down to just a "snippet" to make it easy enough to follow. It is several pages long.
