Removing Unused Features

[JiffiPop]

Hi all,

I'm in quite a pickle here. I have a multibody part, but the performance is getting horrible (file size is nearly 1gb), so I need to split it up into a new part file for each individual body, and remove unused bodies

I have done this part, but now I am left with a single part, but it of course still has all of the features from before the 'Remove Body' feature.

I am looking for an expert's take on what the best course of action is. Do I manually go through and delete each feature that doesn't contribute to the end-body needed? I have thousands of features, and about 10 individual bodies that I care about.

As such, individually selecting the unused features that I want to delete will be very time consuming.

I am wondering if anyone has a better way to do this, or has been in a similar situation. I would appreciate any advice!

Thank you,

Jeff Houston

[Chris3]

You use the find tool to find all of the features that have the parent child relationships that you don't want. Use a the build query to add all of the features that you want to keep and then find all of the parents that are not part of those children features.

[JiffiPop]

Hi Chris, thanks for your response. It seems like when I select 'Is Not Parent Of' the features that make up a part, it selects all of the features in the design tree. I also can't see the entire window and cannot resize it to be small enough when I have 'Build Query' open. I will have to keep poking around and get back to you, but at a glance this is not doing exactly what I am looking for.

[JiffiPop]

Please see the attached part. In short, I think the search tool will not do exactly what I want. Here's why:

In the attached part, I have 3 bodies: Body 1 is independent, Body 2 is independent, and Body 3 is a copy of Body 2 that is modified with an extrude pattern.

If you use the search tool as you mentioned, and you search for features that are 'Is Parent Of' Body 3 features, it doesn't select Body 2! But how is this possible, if Body 3 is created by copying Body 2??? Because of this, I think the Search Tool may not be the solution.

Perhaps I am using it wrong, though?

[Chris3]

To be honest I have never attempted what you are trying to do. As far as I can see there is no way to filter on bodies using the find tool so it may not be possible to do what you want. I know you have 1000s of features, but can you just expand all of the features under a single body by clicking the show more features button under the body and then shift select all of the features for that body?

[JiffiPop]

This might work... I would have to select only the features to be deleted. If I get time this week, I'll poke around at it more and let you know if I find a better solution. Thanks!

[Michael]

Why not right click the body you want to have as a part and choose “create part from body”. This will give you a single solid feature referencing back to the original master model. You can then choose to apply the relationship manually when master model changes. 

[JiffiPop]

Hi Michael, thanks for your response. This is exactly how I had the file about a week ago, but I’ve decided to break it up into individual parts for a few reasons: 

1. The multibody model is so large, we are experiencing significant performance issues when modifying, or adding new features.
2. Very few users understand the concept of multibody modeling, and will add to the feature tree of the child part file, not the multibody parent part file. External references should be avoided for the save of simplicity for others. At this point there isn’t much benefit to the parts being multibody, rather than independent parts.

3. Creating drawings of the bodies doesn’t allow you to pull in dimensions - all dimensions must be manually added.

[tbraxton]

I am fairly certain that you are stuck using the model tree to select the features contributing to a body.  It is possible to select features in the graphics window but that will not be efficient.

Review this article dealing with features being moved between bodies. If the find tool was useful in this context, I would expect that it would be noted in this article. You would use the same selection methods in your use case as noted in the article.

Article - CS375012 - How to move existing feature/s from one body to new body in Creo Parametric (ptc.com)