Illustrate - reuse illustrations for alternate assemblies

[TomM]

Hi.

Creo Illustrate 7.0 here.

Long story short - Is it possible (in a direct or indirect way) to reuse illustrations for different - alternate - versions of assemblies?

What I mean by that - Let's say I have a dozen of top level assemblies of a complicated product, say a car. I have created a set of illustrations (let's say 200) for car No. 1. And it's cool.

Now, car No.2 is 80% exactly the same, but just some components are part of different subassemblies, they have a little bit different geometry and parameters (attributes). They may end up in different subassemblies sometimes but in general the structure is very similar. It's just a bit different version to car No.1. 

Same story goes for 3rd, 4th car and so on. They form a group of products from the same family, but differ in detail.

I wish to reuse the set of illustrations I've spent a lot of time polishing for the whole family of cars. I wish to tweak some things here and there but under no circumstances want I to recreate every single illustration. I'd rather kill myself. And I wish to create a separate c3di file for each of the top level cars.

There's Link but I don't think it cuts it. </replace> seems to be 100% the same as "Replace part" tool under Edit Structure GUI. Replace part works well enough when it comes to single parts, however if there's a chassis comprising 90% of repeating items underneath but has different assembly number and just slightly different subassembly structure then it wrecks hell in c3di file.

I've figured out an indirect way to copy 100% accurate illustrations between c3di files which have the same file structure in manifest and folders. I'd wager there should be a way to do similar thing for file substitutions.

I'd be really happy if I end up with the same set of illustrations with corresponding items retaining visibility states and positions of the original assembly for which I had created them. 

[TomM]

The same question but from a different angle:

Let's say I have several assemblies. Each consists of plethora of subassemblies and those subassemblies have parts and sometimes more subassemblies.

I've created a set of illustrations for top level items and subassemblies (top level items reference some of those subassemblies).

Now an engineering change comes through, which replaces a mid-level subassembly with another one. They differ with only one item but that change required that the whole subassembly had to be given a new item number and in essence become a new subassembly, which replaced the previous one in some of the top level assemblies.

So as far as I know at the moment I need to open each and every assembly that contains the swapped subassembly, "update link" in edit structure and now I'm stuck with a displaced subassembly in every figure for every top level assembly illustration set. Am I right? There's no way around it?

[VladimirN]

@agarland Could you please take a look?

[agarland · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Yes, you are correct.

The way to handle this is to use the replace option in structure edit to replace the old assembly with the renamed new one.

Once any node in the tree is renamed or moved it is treated as a new node as there is no way for illustrate to know it is an existing node that has been edited.

[TomM]

Thanks for the answer.

I was afraid this is the case 😞

It's a hurdle, though I might fiddle with some basic programming to automate some things.

Another question concerning similar issue - animations or sequences. Is there a way to substitute some or even all of the parts involved and not to be forced to remake the whole thing from scratch? I tried to both update the link to a new CAD tree and substitute parts and I'm left with grayed out items in animation tree with no possibility of relinking old parts to new ones. I also tried to edit several things in Figure xml files but I can't find a way to make it work either way.