Has anyone studied the effect of numerous flexible components on assy regeneration time?

[Patriot_1776]

creo 3 M130

Has anyone looked at this potential issue?  I would imagine it would slow down the regen time, but how much?  If it's a minimal hit in speed, awesome, my idea for flexible fasteners will work.  If it's a major issue, then I'm hosed.

Anyone had a good look at this?  If not, I'll have to do some testing.

Grazie!

[rreifsnyder]

I don't have anything like a time study but if you are talking about a large riveted assembly for instance then yes there is definitely a regeneration issue. I could be wrong but my understanding is that EACH placement will regenerate separately. I don't think it's like a family table where the model would regenerate with the particular length once then just use that geometry because each placement COULD be different. We don't allow them for this reason. We just model something like a rivet at the max grip length for that size. That way at least we have an interference check if they use one that's too short. 

[Patriot_1776]

Yeah, thanks, methinks a test is in order.  This is a good time to do it, BEFORE we make our minds up about how we do our fastener library.  I was thinking of doing maybe a 100 fastener pattern.  For the work I do, I can't think of anything needing more than a dozen fasteners.  If that hold true for the other things we do here, it wouldn't be an issue, but I'll talk with the admin who would probably have a better handle on the various types and sizes of assemblies that get done and vaulted.  I know there's some structural design done here that moght potentially use hundreds (or even thousands) of fasteners, but that might be done in Revit so it wouldn't be an issue.

It would be nice to have a time comparison though to compare apples to apples.

[TrainStopper]

It's one of those "it depends" things.

The regeneration time hit will depend on how many flexible items and how much else is going on in your assembly. A small assembly wouldn't be a big deal.

We had to back off on using flexibility for some applications - especially variable text on tags in larger assemblies - because it appeared to require multiple regenerations to get it set in the assembly, almost like it had to regenerate the assembly to regenerate the tag, so very top-heavy.

It was much faster to regenerate the assembly where the tags were modeled with a huge family table with dedicated instances of each.

Flexible was taking something like 15 minutes where the family table approach was taking less than 5 minutes plus fewer crashes.

[Patriot_1776]

Yup.  The old dreaded "didn't finish the regeneration" issue.  They REALLY need to fix that instead of forcing you to regen twice.  Why twice works instead of 3 times is anybody's guess.  I've seen that enough with relations, especially conditional relations.  It doesn't surprise me that you guys saw the same thing.  That's pretty dangerous, especially when dealing with drawings that NEED to be correct.  One thing I also found was that try to avoid driving geometry dimensions with a parameter when it comes to flexibility.  It takes 2 regen's vs. one if the dimension is flexible.

I think I've verified that we CAN use flexibility the way I envisioned, which would have been perfect for the last company I worked for using creo (my last job was actually on NX 8.5 for almost a year) because our assemblies were small.  For what I'm doing now the assemblies are small and it'd work perfectly, but I don't have a good enough feel for the site-wide implications of my proposed library.  From what I've seen, I THINK it would be the way to go, but I'd prefer to verify.

On a similar note.....I wonder if I should simply make my "regen" mapkey actually do a regen twice....  Hmmmm.....

Thanks for the feedback guys, keep it coming!  🙂