Surface copy in a start part

So you want to have a start part that has a measure of a surface area of a copied surface that hasn't yet been defined (source does not yet exist)?

I am not seeing how that would work - without at some point, having to define the references of this copy feature so that actual geometry is measured.

One way, would be just to have a start part with the failed features suppressed.  Then once the geometry is there, resume them and then edit the references of the copy feature...

Or, why not just keep a "demo" cube in your start part, design your part, edit the references of the copy feature and then delete the cube?

I also recommend that you read up the help on user-defined-features (UDFs) and maybe also annotation elements and see if those would work for you.

BTW, foot contact surfaces should probably never be food contact surfaces 😀

I am not convinced that you will be saving much if any effort by trying to build this into a start part.  How many times in a year will you use this start part within your company? This is something I have needed to manage in many designs and with multi-body modeling support it has become easier than it was prior to Creo 7.

The designs I work with usually have constraints associated with a control volume of a fluid so we create a fluid master model that represents the volume of a fluid contained within the design. In principle we design parts of this nature from the inside out.  By doing this you have direct control over the surface area and volume in the Creo design intent. I realize that you probably are not working under such constraints but by building a model of the fluid volumes it may be more productive. You can develop your solid parts as a derivative model of the enclosed volume as needed.

If you have a model or body representing a control volume it makes managing the design constraints more efficient. You can directly measure the volume and wetted surface area in the fluid master using analysis features as you are currently attempting. These analysis features will contain the parameters for use in relations inherently.

I have used this approach to create design templates for blender jars which sounds like it is more applicable to your applications. The master model jar can be morphed into different volumes/sizes based on requirements. Using BMX this master model can be modified in seconds to hit a volume target.

An example on the opposite end of the spectrum using this approach where it is even more valuable is in the optimization of cooling channels for thermal management in a design. In contrast to designing a "solid" part and then measuring the volume,  the fluid master application described above can be more expedient during design and analysis.  In complex designs requiring simulation dependent on the geometry it represents an order of magnitude improvement in productivity during the design phase of a program within Creo as well as the simulation tools used to analyze the design.

Cooling channel master model

Measuring and copy surface features fail when no geometry exists in the start part. Which is inconvenient because a start part by essence has no geometry in the first place. Your start part then is flawed with regeneration error and you need to make the life simple for your users.

Your measure features exist under the condition previous solid features exist. So you need a conditioning mechanism. 

Did you explore Pro/Program? where you can add some script in the background of the part. 

Not sure though how to "detect" solid geometry with it.

Thanks for all the ideas.

There seems to be no easy solution. I will have a look at UDFs and Pro/Program, probably in combination with a mapkey. Unfortunately this has low priority on our side.