Patterned Surfaces

[John.Pryal]

Hi all,

i wonder if anyone out there can help me. I am having great difficulty patterning surfaces around an axis. What i am trying to do was so much easier in much older versions of pro-e, 2000-i & older. I don't know what changed in the wildfire versions, but i find it almost impossible to pattern these days. Try & picture a Coca Cola bottle, you essentially have a round bottle with contoured flutes around it. You surface one flute, comprising of multiple surfaces, merge these surfaces, then pattern them around an axis, sounds simple, but it is not. In 2000-i you could pattern the resultant quilt, now you do not appear to be able to pattern quilts, when you select a quilt, the pattern icon remains greyed out. It would appear that you have to start grouping features together before you see the pattern icon active, but this is where the fun & games start. Pro-e is very unpredictable, sometimes i get what i want, but most of the time it is an absolute battle trying to pattern multiple surfaces merged together. Am i missing something, some vital piece of modeling procedure. I have never had any real surfacing training, not since 1997, i have figured out each new release as it came. Anyone got any tips?

Best Regards

John

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[Kevin]

If your surface is dependant on construction geometry to create the surface (ie curves and sketches) try copying the quilt and pattern the copied quilt.

[SteveMeyers]

Hi John,

I looked into this, and I was successful in WF5 by doing the following:

• Merge surfaces
  
• Group the merge with the original surfaces (not sure why this is required, but it's the only way I could find that gives access to the Pattern menu.
  
• Select the group, and then from the Edit menu, select Geometry Pattern, and set the pattern type to Axis
  
• You'll be prompted to select an axis
  
• Enter the number of instances for the pattern
  

The nice thing about the Axis type pattern is that no dimensions are required to establish the pattern direction.

Video attached.

Hope this helps.

[BrentDrysdale · Accepted solution]

Hi John,

The way I think of it is that you are trying to pattern the surfaces rather than the group of surface features and their construction features.

Thus the method we use is as Kevin says. To do this set your selection filter to geometry or quilts and select the surfaces you want to copy. Use Copy and Paste to make a copy of just the surfaces (not the surface features). When you select this new quilt you will see you can pattern it pretty much any way you want, including axial.

As far as I can remember this general approach was good practice right back to at least Rev14 when I started learning ProE and was set out in a 1996 book we have, called "Pro/ENGINEER Tips and Techniques" by Tim McLellan and Fred Karam, in a chapter entitled "Feature reduction when creating complex shapes" (they made an example of a fan blade for use in making a full fan model). The big change in WF was the way you select the surfaces.

I have not thought of the way Steven has suggested but it seems likely to work. However I would be concerned with all the extra constructional features that were being copied to achieve the end result. As always with ProE there can be several ways of achieving the end result and you get to choose which one works best for you.

Hope this helps.

Regards, Brent

[SteveMeyers]

Brent,

I like your solution better, it's cleaner.

[John.Pryal]

Thank you guys, that worked a treat. I spent 4 hours yesterday trying to pattern & then merge all these surfaces, i came in this morning & within 15 minutes had my model finished. It was the geometry pattern that held the key here. I was able to pattern then pattern merge the original quilt without copying it first, & so did not end up with a reduntant construction quilt. Thank you once again guys, this forum is invaluable, the times it has saved my skin!!

Best Regards

John