materials in Creo

[nrollins]

Hi all,



It is Creo Wednesday. And I'm here again with a question.



I am switching a part's material from Aluminum to HDPE. I am surprised to
see that the Materials Folder has only 20 materials (6 alloys of iron. 1
alloy of "steel" and one of "ss" hmm.) I wonder who chose this list and
what criteria they used to select the materials to include in the standard
library. But, that is not my question.



Is there a more comprehensive materials list that exists in my installed
folder tree that I can access? Is there a materials database / list that I
can get from PTC ? Is there one that someone out there has created and
would be willing to share? Is material designation inside Creo a useless
feature and no one uses it and that is why PTC did such a half-hearted job
providing a list?



Thanks for reading.



-Nate


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[DonSenchuk]

The materials folder is located at:

<loadpoint>\CreoParametric\Creo 2.0\Common Files\M090\text\materials-library

I've never seen an expanded materials database provided by PTC.

I've always had good luck with

[kimndave9]

"Is material designation inside Creo a useless feature and no one uses it and that is why PTC did such a half-hearted job
providing a list?"

The converse. PTC did a half-hearted job so nobody uses it, leaving it a useless feature.

In terms of plastics I can understand part of it as the properties are highly temperature, processing, and formulation dependent. Maybe the rest is just risk aversion to avoid problems with customers depending on properties and having bad outcomes. A great use of materials has been continuously thwarted - controlling the appearance of items. PTC has continued to shoot down the idea of using materials in family tables as a means to control colors and textures.

[BrianMartin]

Continuously thwarted? Some of the stuff that comes over the exploder makes me scratch my head. I'd love to reply but there's never time to get into the intricacies of an issue with random people who usually don't listen anyway. But then there's statements that are just blatantly wrong. Of course you can set a material in a family table and have the color change based upon that material. Unless you're still using WF2, this has been available for several years.

I wouldn't call that an attempt by PTC to "thwart" the use of materials files. It's also preposterous to claim that PTC purposely crippled the materials functionality in some way so no one would use it.

Do you people ever listen to yourselves?




Sent from my T-Mobile 4G LTE Device

[kimndave9]

Maybe. I'm not lucky enough to have access to maintenance, but you are. You did not comment on this thread at http://communities.ptc.com/message/234094#234094

If they are mistaken, please take the time to correct them.

****

FYI: PTC's official stance with colors in material appearances for family tables is:

https://www.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS136141

https://www.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS35751

[BrentDrysdale]

Hi Nate and others.
Materials files got reviewed back in wf3 and still use that 'newer' format
that is good for both ProE (creo) and Mechanica.
As far as I have been aware there have only been a very limited range of
base materials and I have added my own with provisos noted about 'it
depends' for plastics properties.
Ides prospector is a great source for plastics specific info and I see it
has just added metals. I also use matweb as another described.
Brian picks up on a little known ability in ProE for materials to have
colours assigned to them though you would need to have some sort of
differentiation in the material name to use family tables to make coloured
instances.
I suspect the reason that PTC does not supply a fulsome list is down to
liability and you can see why where even in one plastic material specific
grade it depends on the testing conditions as to the property values. Then
when you mould it are you going to get those ideal test bar values?
Anyhow not tricky to make your own and doing this gives a better
appreciation of the material.

Regards. Brent

[davehaigh]

This slide is from my ProE Admin 101 talk back in 2010. There are a lot of things you can assign to a material. This was based on what was available in Wildfire 2.0.

The reason I suggest having an unassigned material and making it black hole dense is so it will be readily apparent that something is wrong with your weight when you run a mass property calc. Then by showing the model tree columns for mass, & density. You can easily find the offending part in a large assembly.

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David Haigh