Export STEP File To Always Include Hidden Geometry

[Bob_Johnson]

My Company has a part that has some complicated inner workings. We don't want to share these inner features with customers when we send them STEP files of our assemblies. 

My thought was to extrude a solid feature through all the part geometry to hide the inner working when I export a STEP file (see example below).

Is there a way to have that extrude feature hidden during normal Creo operations, but have it shown when I save this part as a STEP file?

In this way my designers could see all the inner workings of the part, but they export the part as a STEP file to send to a customer, all the inner workings are hidden automatically.

Thanks,

Bob

[DavidBigelow]

Q: Is there a way to have that extrude feature hidden during normal Creo operations, but have it shown when I save this part as a STEP file?

Yes - Use Pro/PROGRAM to enable/suppress the Feature by a Parameter... This is a bit of a pain because it will not be obvious that it is there...  But if you put a INPUT requirement on the Pro/PROGRAM it will politely request an answer to that question every time they regenerate.  🙂

You can easily do this using Nitro-PROGRAM --- for FREE.

Hope that helps!

Dave

[Pettersson]

I'd go with a mapkey option. Make sure your extrude is consistently named, then make a mapkey that searches for that feature, unsupresses it, exports a STEP, then supresses it again. Shouldn't be too hard.

If you're on Creo 7 and multibody, you might be able to do this using that functionality, but I haven't upgraded yet.

[remy]

Did you try the shrinkwrap functionality?

indeed multibody in Creo 7 is a great new alternative.