Method to collect and publish all surfaces that are tangentially connected ?

[pausob]

Does anyone use intent surface type of datum reference feature?

During its creation, one has option to use the collection rule "all surfaces tangentially connected to the seed surface", which would be extremely handy:

Now, I could swear I was able to select this feature in the model tree when specifying the surface sets for publishing:

But this doesn't work now (did it ever?).

I found that if I name this intent reference, then I can build a search query to find all surfaces that comprise this intent surface-quilt-thing.  I can even save this query inside the pub-geom feature, and obviously this works way better than manually selecting tangentially-connected surfaces.

However, it would be even better if there was a way to directly reference the intent surface in the published geometry - as the query method does seem to require that the query be (manually) updated if my part geometry changes.

If anyone has any tips or insights, it would be greatly appreciated.  These user-created intent objects are a bit of a mystery.  I did come across a good reference: Reference feature - intent objects but it doesn't address my current question.

[tbraxton · Accepted solution]

It appears you may have found a bug. You should be able to select intent reference itself in the collector for the pub geom. For this paradigm you want to be selecting references and not surfaces/quilts. For direct selection try using the RMB to cycle through available picks and see if that works (it did not for me in Creo 4 M110). I used seed/bound select when creating REF2 in this example and it works. When I use tangent surfaces collection for the creation of the datum reference I can not select the reference feature it in the pub geom creation.

I was able to work around this by using seed/bound to create the ref feature then creating the pub geom to use this ref feature and then rerouting the ref feature to tan surfaces and it updated the pub geom to use the tan surface selection.

This is an example of what the UI should look like when selecting a datum ref for inclusion in pub geom.

Selection of the intent reference feature

[pausob]

Thanks! that work-around works like a charm and enables the tangent-connected geometry to be automatically published.

The weird thing is, this intent-feature can end up being referenced in different way on my system:

(the first time I published, the intent reference object did show up in the "References" section like in your screenshot)

Creo 4 M090

[tbraxton]

I should have been more clear about my example, it is not the only way to select the  intent surfaces or a quilt of a datum reference feature. The reason I suggested to pick the datum ref feature is that it I think you will find it is more robust when model changes are implemented. There is more than one way to define the selection for inclusion in a pub geom typically.

[pausob]

Interesting.  Well it seems I spoke too soon.  In some of my models, I was able to trick Creo into publishing a tangent rule type of a ref. intent surface (by first defining it as seed-and-bound and then editing its definition).  In some of my other models, the pub-geom feature regeneration fails as soon as I make that switch in the intent.ref feature.  And I also have models where I don't have to resort to this trickery and I can publish the tangent-collected intent.ref feature.

I'm done fighting with this for now.  I wonder if this flakiness is fixed in later Creo releases (>4).

[tbraxton]

I tested this issue yesterday in Creo 7.020 and it is the same, so if it is a bug it is still there. I have only tested it on 3 models and was able to employ the workaround on any model where I could not select the reference feature directly. It looks like a big to me and I will notify PTC about it. I will post the response here when I get one.