I also work in the molds industry, and this is not only a requirment of all our clients for the parts to be machined, but it's also something that makes us waste a lot of time painting those holes manually, and having to check every time we change a hole number in a pattern, to open at least two parts just to repaint those added holes.
I do not know Catia very much, but as someone here already shown, it makes that process fully automated. I have tried a Top Solid 7 demo a few year ago, and it was miles ahed of Creo in this kind of automation. Not only in transferring colors, but also in the process of making "negative bodies" in general for assembled parts. I think this could be replicated with the multibodies that were implemented in Creo 7, but not much was added in Creo 8, and I do hope that PTC @mneumueller have something to improve this usage case of the multibodies and "negative holes", ie, letting the hole command to generate the "negative body" (usually the threaded portion) to be joined with a component negtative body. Then, like Catia seems to have, and Top Solid definately has, make the assembly process of a component or of an assembly take into consideration any "negative" geometry to be subtracted uppon the selected components in one step. Meaning, there is currently only one flag in the multibody methology, signalling it's a construction body. I propose to add another flag to indicate that a body is intented to be acutout (negative geometry) to be subtracted when a part is assembled. Since we have this flag, when assembling the part the user interface should present the user a selection list of bodies with the "cutout" flag assigned, to allow a user with a simple cliick assemble the component and automatically aftrwards make a boolean subtraction on the automatically or manually selected components's bodies. If there is a single body with the "cutout" flag activated, this body suhould be automatically selected to be subtracted on the selected (intersected parts) uppon assembling the component.
Also, with the "cutout" or "negative geometry" should automatically give a "tip" to the hole command that any hole on one of it's faces should generate a "protrusion" instead of a "hole", ie, if selecting a face of a prism to be used as a box cutout to start a threaded hole, the hole instead of being cut in the body, it's extruded out of the cutout body, with an external thread insteadd of an internal thread. I cannot do it with multibodies, but almost can do it using different parts and boolean operations between parts. It transfers colors, axis, and threads, which the multibody booleans operations do not do (but should be improved to allow). The only problem with this approach is that we have to manage lots of parts for the cutouts with a filename (I'm using Creo 7 and not 8, so, this would not be a problem if using embedded components). Even if we can do it with this approach, there is missing the auto-cutout uppon assembly that other CAD packages allow, for us not to forget to apply the threaded holes, or cut the space that will be occupied by the assembled component.
